International Workshop on Chinese Labour Regulations

Issue No : 78  January - March 2011

By Wang Ting (PhD candidate)

On 6-7 January 2011, AMRC, Worker Empowerment and the Department of Applied Social Studies of City University of Hong Kong held an international workshop on the 'Changing Labour Regulations in China- Practice and Challenges'. It is part of the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) sponsored research network, ‘Rising Powers, Global Challenges & Social Change’, with similar events in the UK, Indiaand Brazil. This workshop congregated 100 scholars, researchers, graduate students and practitioners from the Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, India, Brazil and the UK to present their findings and share their work experience, with the purpose of reviewing the implementation of the Chinese Labour Contract Law launched in 2008.

In general, the participants considered that the Chinese Labour Contract Law, after three years of implementation, has not been working effectively to protect labour rights, and conflicts in labour relations have continued to deteriorate year by year. They commented and concluded that inside and outside the current social and political institutions, different stakeholders should cooperate with each other to promote the implementation of labour rights, especially collective bargaining, as these would in fact lead to the sustainable development of the whole society.

Participants also discussed the challenges and possibilities of legislation of collective bargaining and trade union reform in China, drawing on experiences of collective bargaining and union organizing in Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Brazil and India. The workshop ended with a roundtable discussion on the strategies to improve workers’ rights in a changing social-political context.

Dr. Chris Chan from the City University wrote a commentary for this meeting in the MingPao newspaper. He first highlighted that 2011 marks the beginning of China’s twelfth Five-Year Plan. One of the priorities of the plan is to expand national domestic demand and to increase the labour share of the country’s gross national product.

However, the situation is that along with China’s miracle economic growth, the ratio of wage in GDPhas continued to decline from 57% in 1983 to 37% in 2005, and the state’s strategy of merely adjusting the minimum wage has proved to be unsuccessful in meeting the needs of current labour relations. Just observing the nation-wide labour strikes from May to July last year in China, it is obvious that the improvement of industrial relations still has a long way to go.

He also pointed out a typical phenomenon in current labour strikes, that more and more workers tend to adopt collective ways of protesting, which has aroused attention in Guangdong Province and the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, where labour strikes are mostly concentrated. The local governments there have tried to speed up the legislative process of the ‘Democratic Management Regulations of Guangdong Province’ and ‘Regulation of Collective Bargaining in Shenzhen Special Economic Zone’. But the legislative has been put off due to opposition from business chambers from Hong Kongand overseas.

Finally, he argued that the biggest obstacle of further implementation of collective bargaining might lie in workers’ self- organization and their right to strike, which remain unprotected legally.