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Mainland Media
The ACFTU and the Tax department – working together to collect “union” duesThe following is an article taken from the China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group and translated by IHLO*. It is written by Zhang Jiankang, a human right lawyer base in Xian. Zhang also represents the lawyer Guo Zhisheng who is currently in detention facing charges of “subversion” following his support for rural villagers in a land dispute with the local authorities. The growth of lawyers willing to defend local people – workers, villagers, urban petitioners and the like has been dubbed the Weiquan movement – rights defence movement. The work of lawyers and their increasingly outspoken criticism of human and labour rights abuses is becoming increasingly important and touches on a wide range of cases of intrinsic relevance to the work of labour rights activists and ordinary workers. This article looks at some of the tactics used by the government to repress, control and harass law firms taking on civil rights cases. In this instance it refers to a joint action by the ACFTU and the Xian tax department which calls on all law firms to pay union dues, regardless of the existence of any union operating at a law firm. This comes as the ACFTU continues its campaign – sanctioned and supported at the highest levels – to “organize workers “in private enterprise, before they organize themselves. This new regulation referred to in the article, along with a range of other new tactics, shows clearly the complete integration of the ACFTU in and with the government administration and bureaucratic bodies. __________________ In recent days, law firms in Xian city, when they report to the city's administration of taxation, would receive a strange “government document”, issued by the very same administration. The document and its related annex, require the law firm to pay another extra two percent of its salary expenditure as trade union dues, otherwise the administration may take legal action against the law firm. Such a development makes me ask, what is going on? On 20 September 2006, the Xian municipal ACFTU and the Xian municipal administration bureau of taxation jointly issued a “Notice on the City's administration of taxation to collect union dues from the city's enterprises and public services units” (issued by Xian ACFTU, document number (2006)51). The notice states that starting from 1 October 2006, six local districts (out of 13 districts and three industrial zones), the local tax bureau would represent the local ACFTU to collect union dues. It says such a practice would first serve as a trial with the aim of broadening such a practice, i.e. the tax department involved in this pilot scheme should endeavor to do a good job while the tax departments not involved should learn and get prepared for the same work in the future. The notice gives the local tax bureaus the power to collect, calculate and to process union dues, by using the methods and procedures from the regulation; “Measures on collecting Xian Municipality’s union dues”. So where did this “Measure” come from? Is it legitimate? The notice explains,
This “government document” is so strange and horrifying, even though it is also a very creative document. That the Xian municipal ACFTU and the Xian local administration of taxation got together to issue and approve such a document is one of the more creative acts of the administration in China. By law, the Xian ACFTU is “a people's organization voluntarily formed by the working class” (see Article 2, Trade Union Law), while the administration of taxation bureau is a strong local administrative department. For a weak organization to work with a strong one, means that it can help change the usual practice of an enterprise ignoring the payment of union dues. If a “people's organization” like the ACFTU could merger with the tax department in an instant, then all the other people's organization should try to work their way towards getting get a powerful partner – to use another’s' authority to make itself more powerful. In China, the lawyers, as stipulated by law, form their own associations independently (although in practice any do not form such associations). Each lawyer and his law firm pay a fixed amount, i.e. not higher than three percent of their income, as stipulated by law, as a membership fee to the local Bureau of Justice. Now if lawyers are forcibly charged with another two percent union dues, it would be a 60 percent increase in these types of dues. Such an administrative measure is just like robbery, it takes away the lawyers' rights (to join the ACFTU). Law firms in Xian have different reactions to this cunning and graceless “government document”; most of them think they cannot fight it, but a few decide have decided to resist it. One law firm's director says, “today it is the ACFTU and the tax department asking for money, tomorrow it could be the consumers' council, then the patriotic health committee, the neighbourhood office, all sorts of things… they are so annoying.” These lawyers are refusing to pay the union dues and they are waiting for “legal action” against them so it looks like an administrative lawsuit between law firms and the administration of taxation department is inevitable. 19 September 2007
* Translated by IHLO September 2007. Background |