Come together - ACFTU’s after some collective bargaining
According to an article in the 21st Century Business Herald, the All China Federation of Trade Unions is on another drive, this time to push collectively negotiated wages. According to the article, the aim is to increase proportion of unionised firms adopting the collective bargaining wage system from the current level of somewhere above 60% to 80% next year. The ACFTU will of course also be maintaining its efforts to get firms without unions to set them up.
According to one Beijing-based ACFTU official there is nothing fundamentally different about this latest drive, except that “we’ve put the focus on small and medium-sized enterprises, strengthening the implementation of the collective bargaining system among SMEs”. The campaign also appears to be winning legal backing in some regions: Guangdong, for example, is currently drafting regulations that would establish a legally binding collective wage bargaining system if 20% or more of workers sought it.
I can’t help but feel that this represents yet another misguided effort by ACFTU to make itself more relevant. It will certainly add more bureaucracy and state interference into a system that is already overburdened with them, and if it’s true that SMEs are the focus, the campaign is targeting those least able to cope with extra regulation. If I believed that ACFTU was genuinely going to be acting as a conduit between workers and management, I could at least see some justification for the move as a means of improving communication, but the government-backed union seems to be wilfully misreading the current situation.
A grassroots union official notes in the Herald that union officers “‘inability to negotiate’ isn’t purely due to the fact that they aren’t good enough…often ‘whether to negotiate’, ‘how to negotiate’ and ‘how far to negotiate’ is not up to the company’s union officers. Particularly because they don’t get a lot of practical negotiating experience, company union officials naturally find it difficult to improve their negotiating ability.” Of course, if lack of practise were the main problem then more collective bargaining might solve the issue.
Sadly, the real trouble still seems to be that all too many union officials represent the government first, management interests second and worker interests very much third. Few workers trust their union officials enough to go to them with demands, or when they’re unhappy, for fear of being branded a trouble maker or worse. Frictions and signs of trouble in the workforce are thus not conveyed up to management. Neither is management thinking especially well conveyed in the other direction. Without trust between workers and union officials, putting union officers into collective wage bargaining with management seems pretty pointless. The risk is that the end result may simply be more government intervention in the workplace, with little improvement in worker satisfaction - a situation that will leave no one happy.
Duncan Innes-Ker is a senior economist with the Economist Intelligence Unit