The fundamental right of all workers – the right to strike – was deleted from China’s Constitution in 1982. The state, however, makes a point of never arresting workers for strike actions, the charges are invariably damage to property, public disorder or assault, but these are widely used. Despite the law regarding Trades Unions being amended twice since then, once in 1992 and again in 2001, workers remain denied their basic democratic rights of free association, free collective bargaining and strike action. The ultimate strength of the working class comes from collective action, to deny the class that right is to hamstring it in the face of the employers and their state.
The ACFTU is the only legally-permitted trade union in China and has a very close structural relationship with the CCP, with considerable overlap in membership and with key ACFTU personnel, even at a local level, appointed on CCP advice.[36] The ACFTU was (and is) not a union as understood in the West, but rather a branch of government staffed by careerists whose primary role is to ensure the workers accept government policy. Just like union leaders in capitalist countries these people ensure union power at the point of production is paralysed. To date, the reality has been that if workers take industrial action they find themselves confronting a bloc consisting of the employers, the state (police), and the ACFTU – which has, on occasion, hired thugs to break picket lines and beat up strikers.
Union officials will visit trade union members who are sick or injured and ensure they receive their due payments, arrange New Year parties, works’ outings, sports days and, a speciality of China, matchmaking events, but their key tasks are to maximise productivity and minimise work stoppages whether due to accidents or industrial actions.
However, the form of the official trades union has changed and developed under the pressure of events and government directions. Traditionally, the ACFTU had the bulk of its membership in the huge SOEs of the north east and in government departments. It received its income not from the dues paid by workers but by direct payment from the government, typically 2% of the payroll. The post of trade union branch chairperson carried with it the salary and benefits of a deputy director of the relevant enterprise, and this was a post for life if the activities of the workers were kept within limits acceptable to the enterprise.[37]
A collapse in ACFTU membership and income occurred during the 1990s as the SOEs shed staff in preparation for privatisation. In a decade, membership fell from about 40% of the country’s workforce to just over a quarter. However, with the explosive growth in the number of workers in the SEZs and outbreaks of wildcat strikes and other actions, the government decided the ACFTU should make a determined attempt to establish itself in the private sector as a mechanism for controlling the militancy of the workforce, and increasing the profitability of the enterprises. Over the next five years the ACFTU increased its membership massively and, in an echo of its Stalinist past, professed to have recruited 110% of the workforce in some areas.
These recruitment drives were largely paper exercises whereby the ACFTU, working through the regional or town Trade Union Council, contacted all those companies in a given area with more than 25 employees and reminded them they were legally obliged to have a union and, in many cases, guaranteed no collective actions. The employers signed up with the ACFTU, usually without mentioning it to the workers and were allowed to appoint the company’s union representative, typically the Head of the Personnel Department.
It must be understood that the workers themselves played little or no part in this recruitment drive. In many, possibly most, cases the workers were unaware that they had become members of the ACFTU, which negotiated directly with the employer for the block recruitment of all workers (and managers) in the company. Union dues would be paid by the company as a percentage of the payroll in a direct continuation of arrangements made in the SOEs.[38] Ching Kwan Lee carried out a study of trade union structure in the SEZs and she found that in most cases, enterprise managers were the union officials. Of 250 enterprises examined, senior managers were the branch chairmen in 144 cases, and middle managers in most of the remainder; in only very few cases did shop-floor workers hold even the most minor union posts.[39]
Typically, the owners of a company establish the shell of a union, appoint managers as the required officers and register the union with the ACFTU, paying all the necessary monies. Once recognised, and there are no recordings of such submissions being rejected, any attempt by the workers to organise outside of this company union is illegal and any activists are open to arrest, to be stripped of their residence permit and returned to their villages.
For example, NCW, a Taiwanese-owned enterprise in Shilou Town, Guangdong, employed 550 (mainly) migrant workers who had not been given contracts. As part of the ACFTU recruitment drive the Shilou Town Trade Union Council (STTUC) urged NCW to set up a “grassroots union”. Under pressure from the local Party committee, NCW completed the required paperwork, paid membership fees to the STTUC, and received an official document declaring the establishment of a NCW union, but took no further action. The workers were kept completely ignorant of this process.
Subsequently, a group of migrant workers with some previous experience of factory work arrived at NCW and challenged the company’s illegal labour practices. In the belief that a trade union would help them they approached the STTUC only to be told they were already in a union and must cease their efforts of self-organisation because Chinese Trade Union Law prescribes that only one union can exist in an enterprise. In the meantime, the employer acted quickly, called all the managers (who were, of course, union members) to a meeting and activated the union by appointing the HR manager to the post of union branch chairperson. Naturally, the workers refused to participate but its existence meant that no genuine trade union could be legally established.[40]
A second example is Foxconn. Eight years after its founding (2006), the management of the Longhua plant set up a trade union. This was done at this time because of the double pressure of adverse media publicity about working conditions in Foxconn factories, and the Shenzhen Federation of Trade Unions. The Foxconn union chairwoman is a special assistant to the CEO with corresponding pay and conditions.[41] However, it appears that participation in the union is not encouraged, and a survey found that about 90% of Foxconn workers claim to have never heard of elections for union officials.
A variant of these recruitment processes is where the ACFTU establishes a regional union which attempts to organise all the workers in a particular trade across a number of small factories, and may have been introduced because the ACFTU leadership wanted to head off and prevent a movement similar to Solidarity in Poland. These unions are independent of any one employer but remain highly dependent on the CCP and state policies. The process of recruitment is the same but because the union branch covers a number of small firms there is a tendency for wages to rise to the level of the highest, which is popular with the workers. This system is accepted by the employers because it is backed by the state, acts to control worker militancy and, in the final resort, is of net benefit to the enterprise.
This then, was the policy of the ACFTU during the growth of the SEZs. However, there were three serious problems with it. Firstly, workers were generally unaware that they had become members of the ACFTU, so it had little direct effect on employee-employer relations. Secondly, the ACFTU had, in the main, negotiated with the larger employers but, at that time, it was workers in the medium and small private companies (less than 1,000 employees) who were walking off the job, demonstrating, threatening to commit suicide in public, besieging plants, setting fire to facilities, and even holding bosses captive. The third problem was that few ACFTU officers had any experience of dealing with workers who were in conflict with management, and even fewer had any sympathy with the workers.
However, the impact of second and third generation migrants is having its effect on the workplace. From a very small start, and despite being a very contradictory process, genuinely elected workers’ representatives are beginning to appear. In many cases they emerge during (unofficial) strike action, actively representing the strikers and continue in this role when the strikes are over. At one Shenzhen toy factory, the workers elected five representatives, three of whom were women who had led a recent strike and organised the picket lines, blocking police action. However, such shop stewards are often fired on some pretext once the industrial action is over and the situation defused.
At the same time, the lowest levels of the ACFTU bureaucracy are increasingly having to face angry workers who are taking industrial action and try to get them to end their protests and return to work. This can be very uncomfortable for them. In such a situation the full-time union officials can find it beneficial to have the staff approve (but not choose) the leadership (officers) of the local branch. To date, the one and only time an ACFTU branch has opposed a company’s actions, it was led by such a branch officer.[42] As the class struggle develops the lower echelons of the bureaucracy, those in daily contact with the workers at the point of production, are subject to pressures that make it very difficult for them to behave in an openly dictatorial and class collaborationist manner. Once class struggle is in the air it is quite possible that a number of bureaucrats will side with the workers. Experience shows that a small number of union bureaucrats will give up the gravy train and side with the workers, but only so long as the latter remain steadfast.
As a general rule, Walmart is opposed to the unionisation of its workforce. China is an exception. No doubt the decision was made easier by the ACFTU’s history of subverting effective collective bargaining.
The creation of the Walmart workers union for more than 100,000 workers in the company’s 400 stores followed the usual pattern, being little more than an exchange of correspondence, completion of forms followed by the payment of union dues by Walmart. The process was undertaken quietly, on a store-by-store basis which kept workforce awareness and unity to a minimum. Once the local Walmart store manager received notice that the store was being unionised, the union officers were selected from the store’s managers.
Early in 2014, as part of its response to the slowdown in China’s economy, Walmart suddenly announced the closure of its store in Changde, Hunan province. To everyone’s surprise, Huang Xingguo chairperson of the store’s ACFTU branch, led over 75 workers in a strike against the closure, throwing a 24-hour picket line around the delivery depot to prevent the company from removing goods from its shuttered building.
Despite the company and the local authorities joining forces and the police being sent in to clear the site of pickets, the workers’ determination and the publicity surrounding the event meant the detained workers were released and the pickets were able to return the next day. The outcome was that Walmart was forced to go to arbitration, to negotiate with the strikers, and significantly increase the severance deal.[43]
It was at this time that the ACFTU had launched its so-called ‘grassroots’ initiative so that in a small number of enterprises the branch chairperson was subject to election by, or approval of, the workforce. Huang was one such. Huang says he was motivated by a sense of the injustice being suffered by his fellow workers: “I knew I needed to help the workers, … I knew that if I didn’t, I would not be able to forgive myself.”[44]
The Walmart strike has been widely hailed as small but symbolic. Huang’s participation as chair of the ACFTU branch made a tremendous difference to the combativity and level of organisation of the workers. The case of Huang Xingguo has been hailed as of enormous significance, for reactionaries it is a warning of the dangers of democratisation of the ACFTU, and for militants it is a pointer to the advantages that can be gained by working within the official trade union movement.[45]
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Howell, J. All-China Federation of Trade Unions beyond Reform?, The China Quarterly, No196, pp845-863, Dec. 2008.
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Ibid.
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Mingwei Liu, Union Organisation in China, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 64(1)30-52, Oct 2010.
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Ching Kwan Lee, From the Iron Rice Bowl to Informalization: Markets, State and Workers in a Changing China. Cornell U.P., 2011.
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Mingwei Liu, Op. cit.
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Pun and Chan, Global Capital, …, Op. cit.
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CLB, 24 April 2014, clb.org.hk.
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In These Times, 25 June 2015.
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Reuters Business News, 7 April 2014.
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CLB, 27 July 2015, clb.org.hk.