China enacted a labour law Friday meant to improve workers’ rights amid complaints about unpaid wages and other abuses, and an official tried to assure wary foreign investors they will not be hurt by the new standards.
That last piece is the interest part, for me. I told my students last October about a new set of labour regulations – including more protection for collectivism/unionisation – upon which China was working. When I asked them who was most against the idea, the guessed correctly: the US, or rather US corporations.
Some of the world’s big companies have expressed concern that the new rules would revive some aspects of socialism and borrow too heavily from labor laws in union-friendly countries like France and Germany.
To some extent it has; not with regards to socialism, or anything so knee-jerkingly stupid as that, but with regard to prior fears that some rules would come into place governing the treatment by corporations of temporary workers, laying-off of employees, the right to unionisation – in fact early versions insisted upon union approval of layoffs. Now they just insist that unions be told. Which is fair, the early version would not have worked (for domestic employees and a foreign company? There’s no common good. There’d be no collective rescues a la Delta airlines, for example).
In a very positive move, the legislation was open for public discussion and input, giving the government some 190,000 pieces of same from domestic workers and companies, as well as foreign companies (there’s an American Chamber of Commerce in China, for Cliff’s sake).
Unfortunately the short-sighted media is a little off-perspective. Most of the stories I saw tied this to the recent scandal of slave-labour. A lot of use of the word ‘amid’, which I don’t think is fair (to China or to readers). This legislation has been kicking about since 2005, and it was only a matter of time before it came together and went ahead. Newspapers would do well to remember Tony Abrams, Tom DeLay and the Mariana Islands before getting too worked up about it. For its level of development, China is actually pretty progressive in this area.
1 Comment
July 16, 2007 at 2:54 pm
Very thought-provoking! I’d like to invite you to republish this entry as a posting on the SRI Open Forum. My firm, Marc J. Lane Investment Management, Inc., hosts the online community bulletin board called The SRI Open Forum (just Google the name to find it) which was built as the central location for the free exchange of ideas and experiences around everything related to socially responsible investing, corporate governance, environmental issues, social enterprise, etc. I invite you to visit the site, and feel free to republish this article as a posting. Hope to see you there!