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New democratic trends in China? reforming the All-China Federation of Trade Unions
Reforming the All-China Federation of Trade Unions
Authors:
J. Howell
Publisher:
Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, UK, 2006
This paper examines the rise of direct elections in the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), their significance for the reform of China’s sole trade union federation and for improving workers’ conditions, and their broader implications for processes of governance in China.
It outlines the diverse pressures on the ACFTU to reform and the various initiatives taken to this end. It also reflects on the implications of these findings for the future development of the ACFTU, workers’ rights and broader processes of governance.
The paper also examines what the challenges for the extension of direct elections and for the reform of the trade Union are. The paper argues that there three facing the protagonists of direct elections in the trade union structure.
The first problem is resistance to reform at all levels. Party officials, government cadres, for example, fear that direct elections will provide a channel for dissatisfaction created by the unevenness of economic development and the subsequent diversity of employment conditions and demands. Higher echelons of the ACFTU fear that the introduction of direct elections is linked to attempts by foreign companies through corporate social responsibility to impose international labour standards, thereby posing a political threat to China’s sovereignty.
The second challenge is the need to clarify the identity and interests of the trade union. Trade unionists have to represent both the interests of the Party and those of workers. Until the interest boundaries between the ACFTU and Party are clarified, and concomitantly those between the trade union and workers, we can expect that the spread of direct elections, and in particular the most democratic version of these, will continue to proceed slowly and unevenly.
The third challenge is the increasing power of domestic and foreign capital. While on the one hand it can be a stimulus to change, it can, on the other hand, be used by adversaries to resist reform, drawing upon the ploy of ‘interference in internal affairs’.
