China Labor News Translations

This first CLNT 2010 issue does not bring very good tidings. Fortunately the situation may not be as dire as it looks. CLNT has in possession two Chinese government documents related to the so-called “professional citizens’ agents”. The first one is a long investigative report issued a year ago in January 2009 by the Guangdong Provincial Committee on Politics and Law of the Communist Party of China. The second is a circular on the same topic issue by the website of the Baiying Municipal Government in Gansu Province in Northwest China in April 2009 instructing local government departments to put into operation the Guangdong document.

The term “citizen agents” refers to legal advocates, usually without formal legal qualifications, who offer free or discounted legal advice and representation to clients who cannot afford to hire a lawyer. Legal aid has become a common strategy for labor NGOs in the Pearl River Delta, which assist workers to take their claims to court in pursuit of unpaid or underpaid wages, compensation for occupational injury etc.

It has been two years since labor activist Huang Qingnan almost lost his leg to a machete attack on 20 November 2007. The founder and registered person of the Dagongzhe Migrant Worker Centre in Shenzhen was attacked in broad daylight for his work educating migrant workers about their legal rights and assisting them take their disputes to court. Chinese labor rights NGOs in Shenzhen are accustomed to administrative repression, but this violent attack was a frightening escalation of the threat to worker activists.

In CLNT’s 6 December 2007 issue we worried that the attack might be the start of escalating violence against labor NGOs http://www.clntranslations.org/article/26/shenzhen-labor-activist-attacked . We are pleased to report that the violence has not run rampart in the last two years.

Much is written about the trade union in China, but how much do we know about how it actually operates inside workplaces, and how it negotiates with private enterprises over wages and conditions for workers? The Wal-Mart company-wide collective bargaining agreement was one such insight into the All China Federation of Trades Union’s (ACFTU) approach to collective bargaining. But as CLNT has documented in the posting of May 2009 it was not much more than a window-dressing exercise. (1) Meanwhile, for several years now, the ACFTU has been up-holding another county-level trade-wide collective bargaining model — the Wenling model of “collective wage consultation”, from Zhejiang province. How did the model emerge and what is its significance and implication for Chinese industrial relations? This issue of CLNT seeks to answer these questions. We have translated two Chinese newspaper reports, which discuss how this experiment in collective wage consultation came about, and evaluate the success of the model with reference to the experiences of trade union and government cadre, industry players and worker representatives involved.