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2 Chinese heat is on US
sweatshop lobby By Brendan Smith, Tim
Costello, and Jeremy Brecher
Editor's note: This
article is adapted from a recently released report
by Global Labor Strategies, "Undue Influence:
Corporations Gain Ground in Battle over China's
New Labor Law". The full report is available at
www.laborstrategies.blogs.com
.
In a
historically unprecedented visit, influential
Chinese scholar and labor-law expert Liu Cheng
arrived in Washington, DC, to garner support from
US legislators and labor leaders for a law that is
pending not before the US Congress but before the
National People's Congress (NPC) in China. Liu
Cheng has been a key
adviser to the drafters on a
labor-law reform bill currently working its way
through the Chinese legislative process.
His visit is part of a behind-the-scenes
battle that is raging worldwide over reforms in
China's labor law. On the one side are Wal-Mart,
Google, General Electric (GE) and other global
corporations that have been aggressively lobbying
to limit new rights for Chinese workers. On the
other side are pro-worker-rights forces in China,
backed by labor, human rights, and political
forces in the US and around the world.
Liu
Cheng's visit to Washington was part of that
international support campaign. He warned in an
interview that support for the new law within
China is not enough. "Some National People's
Congress representatives are influenced by the
employer lobby. Although the principles of the
amendments are secure, there may be concessions on
the details, so we call for help."
In
March 2006, the Chinese government, with
considerable popular backing, proposed a new labor
law with limited but significant increases in
workers' rights. But the American Chamber of
Commerce (AmCham) in Shanghai, the United
States-China Business Council, and US-based global
corporations are lobbying to gut the proposed law.
They have even threatened to leave China for such
countries as Pakistan and Thailand if the law is
passed.
Their aggressive tactics appear to
have had an impact. Last December, the Chinese
government released a revised draft of the Labor
Contract Law with significant changes in contract,
collective bargaining, severance, and other rights
guaranteed for Chinese workers that would favor
corporate interests.
The corporate
community quickly claimed credit for these
revisions. The US-China Business Council declared
the draft a "significant improvement". Individual
corporations were also pleased with the results of
their lobbying campaign.
Scott Slipy,
director of human resources in China for
Microsoft, recently explained to Business Week:
"We have enough investment at stake that we can
usually get someone to listen to us if we are
passionate about an issue.
"Comments from
the business community appear to have had an
impact. Whereas the March 2006 draft offered a
substantial increase in the protection for
employees and a greater role for unions than
existing law, [the new draft] scaled back
protections for employees and sharply curtailed
the role of unions."
Despite successfully
removing important pro-worker provisions from the
first draft, the business community has launched a
major new lobby effort to further gut the
legislation, which was expected to be voted on
this year by the National People's Congress.
(Editor's Note: The 2007 session adjourned without
discussing the measure.)
The US-China
Business Council, for example, has told the
Chinese government that elements of the revised
draft are "burdensome", are "prohibitively
expensive", and will have "an adverse impact on
the productivity and economic viability of
employers". One corporate lawyer ominously warned:
"We will have to wait until the final draft is
written and see how the law will be implemented.
If the law is too negative for employers, then we
might see a slowdown of recruitment."
Pushback But as AmCham and other
corporate lobby groups congratulated themselves
and prepared to escalate their demands, forces
inside and outside China organized to oppose this
undue corporate influence.
International
union federations have pressured their employers
to reverse course; human-rights organizations have
mobilized support for Chinese workers' rights;
members of the US Congress have introduced
legislation decrying the corporate intervention
and apparent complicity by the administration of
President George W Bush; and China's official
labor organization, the All-China Federation of
Trade Unions (ACFTU), has taken a strong stand
against corporate pressure.
Such
counter-pressure has fractured the unity of US and
European-based corporations in China and their
lobbying organizations. AmCham in Shanghai, which
lobbied for changes in the draft law, has been
invited by the Chinese government to weigh in
again. But AmCham is meeting resistance to its
position from some of its own most powerful
members. For example, Nike has virtually
repudiated AmCham's position.
According to
Nike vice president Hannah Jones, "Nike has a long
history of actively supporting the Chinese
government's efforts to strengthen labor laws and
protections of workers' rights." When AmCham took
its position on the law, Nike "had yet definitely
to state a position either internally or
externally to AmCham on the draft labor law
currently under review".
The European
Chamber of Commerce in China had initially warned
that the new law might lead foreign corporations
to
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