Labor rights – the WTO column

(tomorrow in Chinabiz)

Shanghai – One of the better anecdotes about former leader Deng Xiaoping concerns his reaction when one of the US presidents urged him during a state visit to allow Chinese citizens more freedom to leave their country. This was – as you might realize – long before international holidays appeared on the agenda of the individual Chinese.
“How many million do you want,” Deng reportedly asked. “You can have them by next week.”

I recalled that story when I read earlier this week that the president Sweeney of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of trade unions in the US, had accepted an invitation by state councilor Wu Yi to come to China and check the condition of China’s workers by himself. It was an offer he could not refuse, although he can also not afford to go to China and discover this is really a workers’ paradise.
The AFL-CIO, and the international trade unions at large, has banned China from its movement after the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989, now almost 15 years ago. Since then China has come back on the international scene in almost any other field, with maybe the ban on trade in weapons as the only other exception. The AFL-CIO has vilified China in the past, officially because of its poor record on labor rights, as independent trade unions are still banned and incidentally forcefully suppressed. This makes China cheaper and hurts the interests of the membership of the trade unions in developed countries, was the argument at the background.
It has not stopped the international trade unions from admitting other countries with a poor labor rights record like Indonesia into their midst, telling their members that this would be the best way to trigger off change. “Double standards”, you would call this in good English.
That argument has not been used for China. Also the International Labor Organization (ILO), the UN organization concerning labor issues, avoids projects in China, afraid of getting into trouble with the international labor movement.

Let me do a prediction: I do not think that Mr. Sweeney will make it to China. After campaigning for fifteen years against China that would be too much of a culture shock and the trade unions have anyway a hard time in retaining membership. Sweeney will already use unavoidable agenda problems as an excuse to cancel his trip and keep the international labor movement isolated.
Because that is what is happening now China is moving ahead on the world stage: not China is isolated, but the AFL-CIO. I guess that Sweeney does not care: with less than ten percent of the American workers organized Sweeney has enough problems back home to legitimize his existence as an important social factor.

Of course China is not a workers’ paradise and has to deal with a large number of very serious labor-related problems. The experience of the international labor movement could be of good use now China is speeding ahead, both economically and socially. While the freedom of workers to organize

Fons Tuinstra