Huzzah for capitalism

[andrewducker]

Last year, the Chinese dictatorship announced a new draft of labour laws designed to finally allow Chinese workers...some basic rights. The new law would permit people...to join trade unions and participate in collective bargaining over wages, safety measures, and work hours. It would give them the right to have a written contract. It would give them the right to a severance payment. It would give them the the right to change jobs freely, without the current bizarre controls from their former employers. Where previously China's labour rules were diffuse, dispersed and barely enforced, now they would be drawn together and backed with big fines.

The dissident-killing Chinese Communist Party didn't propose this change in the law out of a sudden flush of benevolence. They did it because the Chinese people have in increasingly numbers been refusing to be tethered serfs for the benefit of Western corporations. Last year, there were 300,000 illegal industrial actions in China, a huge spate of "factory kidnappings" of managers, and more than 85,000 unauthorized protests.

The Chinese people were showing they did not want to leap from a Maoist gulag to a market-fundamentalists' sweatshop. They demanded a sensible compromise: strong trade and markets to generate wealth, matched by strong democratic trade unions to stop markets totally devouring them. They want an end to grinding poverty, but one that doesn't kill them as they get there.

But they bumped into a huge obstacle. As soon as the draft laws were put out for consulation, groups representing Western corporations with factories in China sent armies of lobbyists to Beijing to cajole and threaten the dictatorship into abandoning these new workers' protections.

The American Chamber of Commerce - representing Microsoft, Nike, Ford, Dell and others - listed 42 pages of objections. The laws were "unaffordable" and "dangerous", they declared. The European Chamber of Commerce backed them up.

This is not the first time big business has militated to prevent basic freedoms from being extended to China. Bill Clinton came to office promising "an America that will not coddle dictators, from Beijing to Baghdad", and at first, he acted on this rhetoric, issuing an executive order that decreed trade with China could only grow if China in tandem increased its respect for human rights. Enraged American business executives subjected him to nuclear-strength lobbying - so Clinton ditched his executive order after a year.

You can read the rest here.

Comments

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

But I want cheap tat. Who's going to make me cheap tat now?

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

The invisible hand of the market!

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Didn't I send you a link to this story on the last day in my old job?

[andrewducker]

Yup. Just took me a few weeks to get round to posting it.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Did you have to wait until you sent it on to someone else, who posted it to their blog, where it was picked up by some kind of hip link site, where someone else found it and emailed it -back- to you? When you get sent links, do you do that to test their worthiness for inclusion on your LJ?

[andrewducker]

Nope, it was just sitting about 20 emails down my to-do list :->