China's trade union visits California labor leaders

via Wikipedia China's only allowed trade union the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) is not only busy it getting organized and receiving foreign guest. In May a delegation of the Guangdong trade union visited California and met for the first time labor leaders of the AFL-CIO, the US union that has been opposing China-relations till December 2007, reports Counterpunch only now.
It was a first time for GZFTU's Chairman Chen Weiguang to visit his US counterparts, he noted.

“We need to protect the rights and interests of the workers and elect leaders who will stand up for workers,” said Weiguang. “Of course, the bosses within the enterprises want a union chair who will be obedient to the company but we believe the union belongs to the workers, not the bosses.”

The Guangdong section of the ACFTU belongs to the relative radical parts of China's trade union, we noted earlier. While not much information is available from different regions in China, different regions seem to go through different developments.
Chen responded to some critical remarks from his audience on his union affiliation with the Communist Party:

“For a long time China was a 'command economy' and unions were subservient to it. There was no distinction between labor and capital because we were all part of the nation,” Chen said. “The Party worked hard for the development of the working class and to educate workers. Things have changed with the move to a market economy and differentiation in factories between bosses and workers.”
Chen said that over the past 30 years of economic reforms, workers have made great sacrifices and now that capital had become too powerful the Communist Party was rethinking the balance of capital and labor, enacting new labor laws as part of that change.