IUE-CWA President Meets Chinese Labor Law Reformer

Washington, D.C.

A leading Chinese legal scholar made two stops with IUE-CWA as he toured the United States seeking support for progressive labor law reform in his home country.

Liu Cheng, a professor of law and politics at Shanghai Normal University, helped to draft proposed changes to Chinese labor law that would give workers the right to written contracts, make it easier for them to change jobs and make it more difficult to lay off workers.

The changes also would step up enforcement of other labor protections that are in the law but rarely enforced.

But even these slight changes to labor law in a country where workers have minimal rights were fervently opposed: not by the government, but by the American Chamber of Commerce on behalf of members such as General Electric, Wal-Mart, Ford and other major U.S. corporations who threatened to pull out investment capital if the reforms passed.

Foreign-owned companies account for 60 percent of Chinese exports to the United States. These companies move their plants to China so they can take advantage of low pay and lax worker protections.

The explosion of foreign investment has led to social upheaval as factories churn through workers who see little benefit from globalization while the upper class vastly increases its own wealth: a familiar tale for industrial workers worldwide. Violent protests and strikes among workers are increasingly commonplace.

"The government is concerned because social turmoil can happen at any moment," said Liu, in explaining why the Chinese government supported reforms. "The government stresses social stability, so it needs to solve existing problems in the society."

Liu met with GE workers at Lynn, Mass. Local 201 and with IUE-CWA President Jim Clark to talk about how U.S. corporate interests succeeded in weakening the role of unions in a second draft of the proposed labor reforms after claiming that the changes would be "burdensome" and "prohibitively expensive."

GE claims that it supports the reform, and its comments were merely technical changes to how the law would be implemented.

But at the same time, GE decisively stated that one of its goals is to maintain "greater flexibility in the employer-employee relationship."

That is code speak for not wanting a union contract that stops companies from treating workers as disposable cogs.