The China Labour Bulletin, set up by long-time labor activist Han Dongfang, announced in its latest bulletin it would abolish its own program to put pressure on multinationals in China to improve workers' conditions.
However, with the implementation of the Labour Contract Law on 1 January 2008, we now believe multinationals will be best served working directly with local branches of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). Factory-level unions are legally empowered and encouraged by the government to negotiate collective contracts and we believe the time is right for the union to engage in genuine collective bargaining rather than the largely pro forma “collective consultations” it has promoted up until this point.Han has been denouncing the state-led ACFTU as a rather useless instrument, organized by the state, when it concerns labor rights, a viewpoint he carried out during international conferences in 2007. The international trade unions are heavily divided in de way they deal with the ACFTU. Some have continued a long-term boycot, because they do not consider the ACFTU as a representative of the workers, but rather as a government unit, pursuing policies of the communist party, including industrial peace at the expense of workers' rights.
Other trade unions have embraced the ACFTU as equals and have over the past few years started to deal with the union, afraid they would otherwise be squeezed out even more in the ongoing globalization process.
Hong Kong based labor dissidents have been funded partly by the international trade unions and their strong anti-China approach was needed to guarantee that NGO-funding over the past decades. It also has put them in a position, where they would never be able to work in China in a more than marginal fashion.
The about-face of Han Dongfang indicates that the pendulum is shifting towards engaging the ACFTU and that might at least in theory offer also a way to the Hong Kong based NGO is play a role in this process.
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Just to clarify.
China Labour Bulletin has not abandoned its collective contract programme, nor has our director, Han Dongfang, done an “about-face” on the question of engaging with the ACFTU. Indeed, with the implementation of the Labour Contract Law we believe the prospects for the development of collective contracts in China are greatly enhanced. With our limited resources we would be unable to effectively work as a facilitator in all these potential cases. As such, we are encouraging multinationals to put pressure on the ACFTU branch unions at their supplier factories (if one exists) to negotiate a collective labour contract on behalf of the employees. This will then put the onus on the ACFTU to show whether or not it is really committed to promoting collective contracts to defend workers’ rights.
Geoffrey Crothall. CLB English website editor.
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