China's trade union takes up a new cause — workers

China’s only legal trade union organization, a tool of Communist Party control long scorned by workers as a shill for big business, is experimenting with a novel idea: speaking up for labor.

“We have to win back the trust of workers,” said Kong Xianghong, a senior trade union official. “Only if we truly represent workers will the workers not reject us.”

Kong, deputy director of the Guangdong province branch of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, has firsthand experience of the perils of rejection. When workers at a Honda car-parts plant in Foshan went on strike last summer, the party-controlled ACFTU played no role in the stoppage — which set off a rash of labor unrest — and didn’t even know it was coming.

Kong rushed to Foshan from nearby Guangzhou, the provincial capital, to figure out what was going on. Getting 1,850 Honda workers back to work took nearly two weeks of testy talks, scuffles and a hefty pay raise.

More critical, though, has been Kong’s mission since. He is trying to convince workers that unlike their restive brethren in Poland before the collapse of communism or in Egypt before the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, they can rely on a labor organization beholden to the ruling party to champion their rights.

“We realized the danger of our union being divorced from the masses,” said Kong, a veteran Communist Party member.

The shift in thinking helps explain why China, though prone to thuggish outbursts by a vast security apparatus, has avoided the turmoil afflicting brutal Arab autocracies: China’s system is rigidly intolerant of political dissent but often supple and responsive on economic matters.

After helping to secure a 24 percent pay increase for Honda workers in Foshan as part of last year’s strike settlement, Kong took part last month in wage negotiations that got them a further raise of about 30 percent.

Shuttling between Guangzhou and Foshan, he has led a drive to reinvigorate the Honda plant’s previously passive official union and pressed management on a host of issues, including the quality of food in the canteen and complaints of allergic reactions to certain chemicals.

Takayuki Fujii, a spokesman for Honda in Beijing, said that the Foshan plant always offered good conditions but that improvements had been “accelerated” since the strike.

Lobbying on behalf of workers marks a departure for a labor organization that, though nominally committed to socialism, has generally focused on keeping workers in line and ensuring that the main motor of China’s economic rise — a steady supply of cheap, docile labor — keeps turning.

The party hasn’t softened its view that workers, along with all others, must never disrupt “stability.” Indeed, in recent months, it has hardened its hostility to even the faintest flickering of public defiance.

But the very success of China’s economic model has meant that workers, particularly migrants from once-impoverished inland regions, now have far more choice over where they work and for how much. This new generation, Kong said, is “not afraid” to make demands.