[Marxism] Trade union realities in China

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Washington Post, Wednesday, December 1, 2004; Page A25
Wal-Mart Loves Unions (In China)
By Harold Meyerson

Wal-Mart has finally found a union it can live with.

Up to now America's largest employer has opposed every effort of its 
employees to form a union. Wal-Mart doesn't recognize unions; it doesn't 
even recognize "employees." The proper Wal-Mart name for its workers is 
"associates," a term that connotes higher status and collegiality and that 
actually means lower pay and workplace autocracy. For the privilege of 
associating themselves with Wal-Mart, its employees are paid so little that 
many can't afford the health insurance the company generously allows them 
to buy. One study of health care in Las Vegas revealed that a plurality of 
that city's employed Medicaid recipients worked at Wal-Mart.

But that was the old Wal-Mart. Last week Wal-Mart announced that if its 
associates wanted a union to represent them, that would be hunky-dory -- as 
long as the union was affiliated with the All-China Federation of Trade 
Unions, a body dominated by the Chinese Communist Party. The official 
statement was simple and seemingly unambiguous: "Should associates request 
formation of a union, Wal-Mart China would respect their wishes."

Wal-Mart America has made no such declaration, of course. Why it deems its 
20,000 Chinese associates who work in its 40 Chinese stores worthy of 
representation while its million U.S. employees can't be trusted with the 
right to represent themselves is a good question. Whence the Sinophilia and 
Americaphobia?

We can, I think, dismiss suspicions of anti-anyone-but-Chinese racism as 
such. The answer, then, must lie in Wal-Mart's preference for old-line 
communist-dominated unions in authoritarian communist states over any other 
kinds of unions anywhere else. America's unions, which Wal-Mart despises, 
have a long history of anticommunism, and today's AFL-CIO is the staunchest 
defender on the American political scene of democratic rights in communist 
nations such as China. For that matter, unions affiliated with reformed or 
post-communist parties outside of the few remaining communist states have 
gotten nowhere with Wal-Mart either. Only in China, with its inimitable 
blend of Dickensian capitalism and authoritarian communism, has Wal-Mart 
found a union to its liking.

And small wonder. Unions affiliated with the All-China Federation seldom 
push for wage increases or safer machinery. Indeed, the locals are often 
headed by someone from company management. Not that there isn't worker 
discontent in China: Every week brings accounts of spontaneous strikes, and 
now and then an occasional riot over such lifestyle impediments as unpaid 
wages. But the role of the state-sanctioned unions isn't to channel the 
discontent into achievable gains; it's to contain it to the employer's benefit.

The leaders of genuine workers' movements in China don't end up running the 
All-China Federation. They're to be found in prison, in exile or in hiding.

Besides, truly democratic unions in China would run counter to the truly 
undemocratic, one-party state. Allowing a democratic union movement to form 
would threaten both Dickensian capitalism and authoritarian communism, and 
diminish some of China's competitive advantage over other low-wage but not 
authoritarian nations in Southeast Asia, Central America and elsewhere. 
Such a development would be anathema to both the Politburo and Wal-Mart's 
board of directors. It would introduce the concept of free choice and the 
prospects of higher living standards not just to Wal-Mart's 20,000 Chinese 
store employees but to the far larger number of Chinese workers laboring in 
poverty-wage servitude to stitch clothing for the contractors, 
subcontractors and sub-subcontractors whose products fill Wal-Mart's shelves.

When a company such as Wal-Mart is so plainly comfortable with 
authoritarianism abroad, it tells you something about that company's values 
at home. Bentonville regards the prospect of employee free association and 
organization within its stores with the same fear and loathing that Beijing 
feels at the prospect of free elections in China. Anti-union American 
employers can't imprison pro-union workers, but exile is a real 
possibility. Troublemakers are free to go. According to Cornell labor 
relations professor Kate Bronfenbrenner, at least 5 percent of workers 
involved in unionization campaigns are fired, which is both quite illegal 
and quite routine: Companies would rather pay the nominal fines than pay 
their workers higher wages and lose the absolute control they hold over the 
work lives of their employees.

The noblest of the Bush administration's goals, surely, is that of 
spreading democracy. If it's serious about that task, though, there are 
places closer to home than the Middle East that could use a little 
democracy-spreading, and the American workplace is high on that list. 
Strengthening labor law would make it harder for employers such as Wal-Mart 
to thwart their workers' desire for an organized voice on the job. When 
America's largest employer feels more affinity for the political legacy of 
Mao Zedong than for that of Franklin D. Roosevelt, it's time to start 
democratizing our own back yard.

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