Watch the trade union in your company - The WTO-column

(later at Chinabiz)
Catching trends in China is a bit of an art. Officially we are talking about a culture of thousands of years old, where very little ever will change.
But when you do not pay attention for two seconds everything might be different while you did not pay attention. AIDS had been a neglected problem for a decade, but suddenly it emerged high up on the agenda after the government discovered the country was heading for a disaster. The environment was taken very lightly for ages, but now efforts to deal with the environmental degradation seems high on the agenda.
There is one other emerging trend that deserves your attention. Perhaps you have a trade union in your company who, in exchange for two percent of your payroll, organize an annual trip for your staff. The ACFTU, as China's only allowed trade unions is called, has been traditionally seen as an extension of the state bureaucracy with very little real impact.
Most of the officials in this trade union might actually have no clue what a trade union is or should do. Preserving the peace, or harmony, was their main task and that meant in the past often that they take sides with management, if they would take sides at all.

But things are changing and Wal-Mart had to give in after two years of resistance against the ACFTU, offering a valuable training ground for trade union officials who were not used to organizing labor.

The recent unionization of Wal-Mart has been possibly the start of a change that will far outreach the current situation at the US firm. Media reports of the whole process have shown a mixture of attitudes toward the whole process, but for sure the ACFTU for the first time since decades got a large scale taste of what it means to organize labor bottom-up. More, they did so with the explicit blessing of president Hu Jintao. That is of course not going to have a direct influence on the trade union people in your company, but certainly a trend that is worthwhile to watch.
While a harmonious society is high on the agenda - at it has officially been for thousands of years - the ways to harmony might differ from those in the past, where economic growth, and much less the quality of that growth, were most important.

Sociologist Anita Chan comes with a few interesting conclusions:

The ACFTU is not the monolithic structure it is often portrayed to be. There are union officials and local unions who understand the principles of organizing and are willing to push the limits. But they are constrained by pro-capital forces within the Communist Party, the government and the ACFTU on the one hand, and domestic and international anti-union forces on the other.

And:

But the ACFTU has little experience of grassroots initiative, and many union officials are nervous about activities that are not top-down and initiated and controlled by themselves. Nor are they accustomed to, or comfortable with, having to organizing workers themselves, whatever the precedent set by the recent experience with Wal-Mart. Reformers within the ACFTU want to push in that direction, as the editorial makes clear, but they are themselves untrained and on unsure ground. Trade unions in our own countries have accumulated a wealth of experience in union organization that they can help transfer to the Chinese union’s reformers—if our unions become willing to reach out.

So, perhaps you should have a cup of tea in the trade union office of your company. It is better to be the first one to notice those trade union people are no longer as boring as they used to be.