ACFTU and Trade Unions
TRADE UNIONISM IN CHINA: SINKING OR SWIMMING?
By Jude Howell (Prof. of Social Policy and Director of the Centre of Civil Society, London School of Economics and Political Science)
SUMMARY
The period of neo-liberalism in the 1980s and post-Cold War context of the 1990s have challenged trade unions throughout the world. With the onset of market reforms from 1978 onwards, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) began to revitalise its activities. However, reform and WTO entry have posed new challenges to the functioning and legitimacy of the ACFTU. This article analyses the nature of the challenges facing the ACFTU in the reform context and traces its gradual attempts at internal reform. The key argument in the article is that the ACFTU is shifting from being an incorporated organisation to a state corporatist entity. Furthermore, though WTO entry has accentuated the need for the ACFTU to become more active in representing workers, the ACFTU is unlikely to reshape itself institutionally to guarantee either the protection of workers or social stability.
From the 1980s onwards trade unions in most countries have experienced declining memberships and diminishing power. The rise of hegemonic neo-liberalism in the 1980s and the subsequent end to the Cold War combined to vindicate the inevitability of market economies and the concomitant supremacy of liberal democracy. In the context of the increasing internationalisation of production and ever-confident global capital, the task of enforcing international and national conventions and laws on employment rights has become even more difficult. The concepts of class and class analysis seem increasingly irrelevant as new technologies demand more skilled and educated workforces and consumerism fuels the expansion of service industries. Trade unions appear like constructs of a past modernist era, rooted in Fordist manufacturing processes and ideological conflict, struggling for survival in a fragmented and diffused global jungle. In the context of increasing globalisation, the decline of manufacturing and the triumphalism of capitalism, the future for trade unions looks bleak.
With one of the largest federation of trade unions in the world, namely, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) and a communist party at its helm, China might seem to offer some grounds for optimism. Yet reports of strikes, slow-downs, demonstrations, workers injured and killed in factory fires and poorly maintained mines suggest that the Chinese government may have more on its plate than it can handle. As laid-off state workers, unpaid pensioners and aggrieved workers take to the streets to make their claims independently of the ACFTU, the legitimacy of the state-sanctioned trade union, and its ability to tackle the new challenges in the reform period, look increasingly questionable. Moreover, the persistent sprouting of new forms of independent labour organising, despite on-going repression, are a constant reminder to the ACFTU that its capacity to represent is overshadowed by its structural relationship to the Chinese Communist Party.
In this article we explore the challenges that confront the ACFTU and their implications for internal reform. We describe the changes that the ACFTU has already undertaken over the past twenty years that provide some grounds for optimism. We consider also the factors affecting the prospects for further reform in the ACFTU. We contend that the most likely future scenario is one where the ACFTU struggles to reform in the direction of state corporatism, attempting to relinquish the coat-tails of incorporation and don the garb of representativity. In doing so it is persistently dogged by its complex relations with the Party/state and challenged by spontaneous labour protests and the relentless rise of new, independent labour organisations .
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