Chinese Labor Leaders Meet with Bay Area Airport Labor Unions

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

(San Mateo Labor Council)Chinese Labor Leaders Meet with Bay Area Airport Labor Unions
By - Paul Burton
Managing Editor, San Mateo Labor

A delegation of union leaders from Guangzhou in southeast China met with union members at the San Mateo Labor Council’s Airport Labor Coalition meeting May 13. The meeting was arranged by SMCLC Executive Secretary-Treasurer Shelley Kessler and Ellen David Friedman, a labor researcher and organizer who has visited China many times over the past 25 years and studied the Chinese labor movement. Friedman said she hoped to build links between the U.S. and Chinese union activists.

    The ALC meeting gave the Chinese labor leaders a chance to hear from leaders of different union locals and learn about their organizing and bargaining history and the cooperation among U.S. unions. Friedman said she wanted her Chinese colleagues to hear about labor relations, and get a concrete picture of unions functioning autonomously from the employer, which she noted was a very weak concept in China.

    The delegation included Chen Weiguang, Vice Director of Guangzhou Municipal People’s Congress Standing Committee, and Chairman of Guangzhou Federation of Trade Unions (GZFTU); Fan Zhiguang, President of Guangzhou Institute of Technology; Lu Fan, Director of International Department of GZFTU; and Wang Shifu, Vice Section Chief of Office of GZFTU. A fifth member of the delegation, Ms. Wu Lei, Vice Section Chief of International Department of GZFTU, was unable to attend the ALC meeting. Friedman’s son Eli served as translator. The GZFTU is part of the All China Federation of Trade Unions.

    About 20 San Mateo county union members attended the meeting, sharing information about union activities and struggles in the U.S. Some told of links they already have with China. Members of the Electrical Workers union are working at the Beijing Airport to build an Air Train people mover; the Engineers and Scientists union has members overseeing maintenance work done for United Airlines in China. The Chinese leaders explained some of the history and recent developments with the labor movement in China, including passage of a new Labor Contract Law that took effect January 1 and the Labor Arbitration Law that took effect May 1.

    “It was a great visit with representatives who are trying to re-form and reshape their labor movement,” said Kessler. “China has some of the best labor laws on the books, but a limited ability to implement them. Hopefully, a new breed of leadership will aid workers in achieving their rights.”

    “If our labor movement doesn’t reach outside our borders, we will never be able to stop international capital from pitting workers against each other across the globe,” Kessler added. “Because of globalization, the challenges that unions face is the same. To assist our colleagues in their efforts to improve the livelihoods of workers, we need to continue to communicate with each other.”
    Friedman said the meeting was historic as it was the first time a very high ranking union leader like GZFTU Chairman Chen had met with U.S. labor leaders at the Central Labor Council level. “This meeting will have an impact on the union movement in China,” she predicted.

    GZFTU Chairman Chen said that information and materials they received from U.S. unions—including a translation of an organizing manual from the Service Employees union—would be very helpful. “We also have to learn about negotiating with management,” he said. Chen explained how union leaders in China are elected, saying that the process was democratic but still needed improvement. “Especially at the enterprise level, we have more development to do,” Chen said. “Selection of candidates has to be done with advice from a bigger group of workers. Now the bosses within the enterprises want a union chair who will be obedient to the company.

    “What we need to protect the rights and interests of the workers are leaders who will stand up for workers,” Chen continued. “We believe the union belongs to the workers, not the bosses. To change the situation we need to be brave and we need help from the public and the media.”

    With the enactment of new pro-worker labor laws in China the situation may be changing as workers exercise their rights under the new labor laws. The China Labor Bulletin (CLB, online at www.china-labour.org.hk/en/) reported that “… the number of labor dispute cases in Guangzhou for the first two months of 2008 equaled the total number of cases in 2001. More than 60 percent of all cases involved non-payment of salaries and over-time.” The CLB also reported that, “The legislative and policy framework for negotiating collective wage agreements has been in place in China since the mid-1990s, however, because of the lack of genuine worker participation in the contract negotiations, these wage agreements have brought only limited benefit to China’s workers. The shortcomings of the current ‘equal consultation and collective contracts system,’ … have been pointed out by academics and labor rights groups in China for many years, and now some trade union officials are finally beginning to take note.”

    At a December 2007 Forum on Collective Bargaining and Corporate Social Responsibility hosted by the Shenzhen Federation of Trade Unions (SFTU), “… delegates agreed that collective bargaining was clearly the way forward but admitted that because of the gross imbalance of power between labor and management in the vast majority of Chinese enterprises, it would be difficult to kick-start the process,” the CLB reported. CLB director Han Dongfang wrote that, “by developing collective bargaining at the grassroots level, enterprise-level unions will be transformed into labor organizations that genuinely represent the rights and interests of workers and once again become a functioning part of the ACFTU.”

    GZFTU’s Chen responded to a question about unions being too cozy with management by explaining the history of the development of unions under the Communist Party and state socialism. “For a long time China was a ‘command economy’ and unions were subservient to it. There was no distinction between labor and capital because we were all part of the nation,” Chen said. “The Party worked hard for the development of the working class and to educate workers. Things have changed with the move to a market economy and differentiation in factories between bosses and workers.” Chen said over the past 30 years of economic reforms, workers have made great sacrifices and now that capital had become too powerful the Communist Party was rethinking the balance of capital and labor, enacting the new laws as part of that change.

    Chen noted that the Chinese government has said that conditions for workers need to be improved and that the Chinese media are supportive of unions. He said that in Guangzhou the media uncovered problems with some enterprises that led to investigations by the GZFTU and reforms, and first exposed the horrific working conditions endured by Chinese coal miners. Chen said the problem of the coal miners was very difficult for the unions and that the situation in privately owned mines was very bad. “We have the problem of having lots of unskilled workers who need jobs, with the mine work offering higher pay,” he said.

    “China is still a developing country, and development is very slow,” Chen said. “One of the goals of the government is to create a middle class. The Chinese government has a more liberal attitude toward unions now.”