An enterprise may form collective contracts with its trade union or its elected employee representatives if the enterprise has no trade union. If a union or an elected employee representative submits a written request to engage in collective bargaining, the employer generally cannot refuse without just cause.
Collective contracts are binding on the employer and all of its employees. Accordingly, individual employment contracts cannot include standards that are lower than those set forth in the collective contracts.
Even in basic labour dispute cases, workers will pay legal fees of at least 5, yuan. Employers are known to hold up cases by endlessly appealing decisions to a higher court. Further, even if the plaintiff wins the case, there is no guarantee the judgement will be enforced against the employer. Given the huge backlog of cases they have to deal with, courts often urge parties to resolve disputes through mediation rather than with formal judgements.
If a worker suffers from discrimination during the hiring process on the basis of gender, medical condition, disability, ethnicity, etc. As such, discrimination cases are treated as civil cases that can be heard directly by the courts without first going through LDACs. Both the courts and LDACs are reluctant to take on collective cases and often break claims down by individual plaintiffs.
As such, when a group of workers have a collective grievance or set of grievances against their employer, they often have no option but to take collective action outside the legal system in an attempt to seek redress. In fact, there have been numerous headline-grabbing strikes over the last decade, most notably the Nanhai Honda Strike in which the workers secured a 35 percent yuan per month pay increase after defying the local trade union; the Yue Yuen shoe factory strike in Dongguan in which around 40, workers walked off the job for two weeks; the Lide shoe factory strike in which workers secured millions of yuan in unpaid social insurance contributions; and the nationwide strikes organized by tower crane operators and truck drivers in May and June , respectively.
Workers at the Liansheng Moulding Factory in Guangzhou make their voices heard in late Many strikes have led to ad hoc or spontaneous collective bargaining, in which workers elected their own representatives and devised strategies to force management to come to the negotiating table.
Often local government and trade union officials become involved in an attempt to bring about a compromise agreement. The authorities typically pressure both sides to make concessions and resume production as quickly as possible.
However, these quick fixes rarely address the underlying causes of the dispute, and, as a result, it is not unusual for another strike to break out six months or a year later. It is also not uncommon for police to be dispatched to the scene of a strike, but their primary role in these situations is one of containment, ensuring that the protesters do not leave the workplace or in any other way disrupt public order.
If workers are detained by police, they are usually released within a few hours, or a few days at most. The vast majority of collective protests around 80 percent are related to the non-payment of wages, and most are not technically strikes; rather, they are collective actions, taken after workers have been laid off to demand payment of wage and other arrears. The construction industry, which accounts for more than a third of all worker protests in China, is notorious for systematic wage arrears, while business failures in the manufacturing and the service sectors have considerably added to the problem.
The worker protests in these wage arrears cases are primarily designed to publicise their complaints and grievances on social media and force local governments to intervene.
Local officials will put pressure on the employer if they can be located to pay at least a portion of the wages owed and then persuade the workers to accept the deal. Local governments and trade unions routinely publicise the amount of money recovered for workers, without explaining how they allowed the wages to go unpaid in the first place.
All workers in China have the right to form or join a trade union. Any attempt to establish an independent trade union will be seen by the Chinese Communist Party as a political threat and dealt with accordingly. The BWAF was declared an illegal organization and disbanded in the wake of the military crackdown in Beijing on 4 June The ACFTU is organized according to a hierarchy of local and regional union federations that basically reflects the structure of the Party and government see simplified organizational chart right.
In nearly all cases, local trade union offices have to defer to higher level union offices or to local government and Party organizations for guidance. The grassroots enterprise unions, which form the foundation of the ACFTU hierarchy, are largely under the control of the enterprise management.
Enterprise unions are generally established by local trade union officials in consultation with management, rather than the employees. Union committee activities are usually restricted to handing out gifts on holidays and organizing social functions. Only very occasionally will enterprise trade union leaders support workers in a dispute against management.
Probably the best-known example of an enterprise union chairman actually taking a stand was Huang Xingguo , who in led Walmart employees in the central city of Changde in a month-long campaign for lay-off compensation after the closure of their store.
The Party is clearly aware of the problem as well as the impact on its own political legitimacy. Indeed, the Party now seems to have accepted that economic growth in and of itself is no longer the answer and that it needs to focus much more on wealth distribution if it is to retain the trust and support of the working class. Specifically, the reform initiative had two main objectives: 1. In essence, what this jargon means is that the ACFTU must abandon its old bureaucratic ways and focus on concrete measures that could both help workers and restore its own reputation.
The ACFTU has claimed, in an endless stream of statements and speeches, that it has heard the call from the Party leadership. In the s and early s, there were dozens of civil society labour groups in China. Many were concentrated in the southern province of Guangdong, and they actively supported workers in their demands for better pay and working conditions.
These organizations essentially did the work of a real trade union, helping workers involved in collective disputes with employers to formulate their demands, elect bargaining representatives, develop a bargaining strategy, and maintain solidarity among the workforce.
China Business Review is the official magazine of the US-China Business Council, a nonprofit and nonpartisan trade association that represents more than American companies doing business in China. Trending Tags Intellectual Property innovation cybersecurity ecommerce tech. April 21, Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Linkedin.
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