China: Facing Reality
On December 6, trade union representatives from 20 countries preparing to travel to Beijing for an OECD meeting on socially responsible investing were informed that their visas had been invalidated and the meeting cancelled. The government gave "inappropriate and inconvenient" timing as the reason for the cancellation. The meeting was to have discussed the application in China of the OECD's Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises.
Trade unionists turned away from the meeting understandably expressed outrage over the abrupt cancellation and its unmistakable political message that international labour standards for Chinese workers are not on the government's current agenda. The incident, however, should be viewed in its larger context. Consider, for example, the following:
On November 16, five former employees of a shoe factory in Guangdong Province owned by the Taiwan-based Stella Corporation were sentenced to up to three years in prison. Their "crime" was participation in protests against low wages, wage arrears and a brutal reduction in overtime pay by over 4,000 workers at the plant. According to China Labour Bulletin, two of the five were below the minimum legal working age when they began work at the factory.
On November 28, fire and an explosion at a coalmine in Shaanxi Province resulted in the death of at least 166 miners. The miners knew there was a fire underground but descended into the pit out of fear that their wages would be docked if they refused to work. Three days later, an explosion in a Guizhou Province coalmine killed another 13 miners. China leads the world in mining accidents and fatalities. Over four thousand miners have died at work in the first nine months of this year. Chinese miners are formally members of the official All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), a state body which is organizationally and constitutionally tied to the ruling Party. Relatives of the Shaanxi miners who approached the ACFTU for help were rebuffed.
On November 22, WalMart China announced that it would not oppose efforts by the ACFTU to represent workers at its 40 Chinese stores "should associates [i.e. workers - ed.] request formation of a union." The following day, an appeals court in Saskatchewan, Canada upheld a ruling by the provincial labour relations board instructing the company to hand over evidence of the union-busting tactics it used to oppose the UFCW's successful effort to organize workers at a WalMart in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. Some weeks earlier, the company publicly threatened to close a store in Ontario where workers had won union representation.
These events are all closely related. China would not account for over three-quarters of global coalmining accidents if workers were represented by genuine trade unions, independent of the Party and the employers. Had there been a union at the Stella plant, changes to overtime would be negotiated, not imposed by decree, and workers would not be imprisoned for the "crime" of demonstrating against a brutal reduction in their already low pay.
WalMart does not have one policy for China (union "recognition") and another for the rest of the world. The company has a single policy of global hostility to unions. In North America they call in the union-busters when workers seek to organize. In China, the ACFTU will get the call if political circumstances require it. The ACFTU is hemorrhaging members as the state sector is sold off, bringing with it a serious loss of control over the workforce and a further erosion of credibility and legitimacy. The ACFTU's move into the private sector should under no circumstances be confused with union organizing and "recognition" by employers. It is essentially a police operation. Union organizing and union recognition by employers are impossible as long as the right of workers to organize is repressed and the ACFTU remains the sole legal "union" in China. Recognition of a union by employers acknowledges the fact that workers have attained a degree of power through organizing themselves into a collective force.
Implementing the OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises in China is impossible for the same reason. The Guidelines call for respecting ILO Conventions on the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively. The ACFTU rejects these Conventions, and refuses to defend working class victims of state repression like the Stella workers. Many things have changed in China; the ACFTU has not. It remains an integral component of the apparatus of power.
The Chinese authorities' crudely transparent cancellation of the OECD meeting should become the occasion for renewed reflection on how the international labour movement can effectively support Chinese workers in their struggle for independent trade unions. A key element in this reflection must be separating marketing hype and the creeping legitimization of the ACFTU from the reality of China's workplaces. A recent New York conference for transnational investors on "How to Make Corporate Responsibility Work in China" promised to instruct corporations on determining "the limits of responsibility". Union busters like WalMart will find this congenial because the ACFTU now gives them a "socially responsible" cover.
The government's refusal to permit international trade unionists to discuss the OECD guidelines on Chinese soil should, at a minimum, also inspire reflection on the continuing scandal of the ACFTU's representation as worker delegates on the ILO Governing Body, a position to which they were elected in June 2002. Ending this farce would be a clear declaration that labour understands that when it talks to the ACFTU, at an OECD seminar or in any other context, it is talking to a representative of state power and not to an organization representing the workers of China. Clarity on this issue is now more crucial than ever, for working people in China are mobilizing on an unprecedented scale and they take great risks in fighting for their rights as workers. As the grim accumulation of mine tragedies shows, they are paying with their lives for the absence of these rights.
