Making the costs of labor law violations higher - Liu Cheng

The Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club (SFCC) make tonight its come-back after a long recess with an interesting evening on the draft Chinese labor contract law. Professor Liu Cheng debated with lawyers from Chinese and foreign law firms about the law. His main argument is that enforcing the law by making breaking the labor law more expensive, is the only way the market will listen.
One of the main opponents of the labor law, the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, was absent in the debate, although the organization has been vilified by professor Liu and others in public. Paul French, a former treasurer of the SFCC, called Amcham even a "bunch of wankers" in a recent analysis of the labor law, a qualification Amcham obvious did not wanted to rectify tonight.
Baker & McKenzie lawyer Jeffrey P. Wilson - who spoke neither on behalf of Amcham nor his law firm - pointed at a whole range of lose ends in the law and argued that most of the regulations to protect Chinese workers were already in the current law; he also saw in enforcement the largest problem.
The third panelist, Ma Jianjun, a partner of Jun He Law Office in Shanghai, brought up an interesting point in the relations between the only allowed Chinese trade union, the ACFTU, and the international trade union movement. The ACFTU collected last year four billion US dollar in contribution from employers. The trade union can get according to the law two percent of the payroll. According to Ma that constitutes a conflict of interest, since trade unions are internationally net supposed to be paid by the employers.
Although I know from my previous trade union experience that there are collective labor contracts - no laws - where employers are required to pay part of the trade union budget, most trade unions would be funded for most of their budget by fees of their members, and kicked out if they would not perform.
Professor Liu Cheng acknowledged the problem but said the ACFTU would have at this stage more urgent problems to solve: "maintaining the social stability and a sustainable development".
(A translation of the third draft of the labor contract law will be available here tomorrow.)