‘Undue influence’: Wal-mart, Google, GE press China to curb workers’ rights

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.pww.org/index.php/article/articleview/11043/1/371

‘Undue influence’: Wal-mart, Google, GE press China to curb workers’ rights

Author: John Wojcik

There is a “tug of war” raging worldwide over reforms in China’s labor law, according to Brendan Smith, Tim Costello and Jerry Brecher, authors of a report released April 5 by Global Labor Strategies (GLS).

On one side of the battle, the report says, is Wal-Mart, Google, General Electric and other transnational corporations that have been lobbying to limit rights for Chinese workers. On the other side are workers’ rights forces in China, including the country’s official laber organization, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), and labor and human rights groups in the U.S. and around the world.

Chinese scholar and labor lawyer Liu Cheng, a lifelong supporter of the Chinese government who can by no means be classified as a “dissident,” flew to Washington in early April to win support from U.S. congressional representatives and labor leaders for a law that is pending before the National People’s Congress in China. He helped draft the measure.

Essentially, he told everyone he met in Washington that without support from labor backers outside China, some representatives in the National People’s Congress, under the influence of the transnational corporate lobby, might push for concessions in favor of the employers.

Unfortunately, events of the last year show that his fears are based in fact.



Business undermines unions’ role

In March 2006, the Chinese government, with broad popular support, proposed changes in labor law with significant increases in workers’ rights. The American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai (AmCham), the United States China Business Council, Wal-Mart, General Electric and even Google immediately went on the offensive. There are reports that Wal-Mart and General Electric threatened to pack their bags for Pakistan and Thailand if the proposed reforms became law.


FULL story at link.

[MADem]

1. Well you won't hear that on the mainstream media!! GE owns the NBC franchises, and they're

affiliated with the WESTINGHOUSE group, which is the parent of CBS....

So we just need to pretend it never happened...look, over there--it's BRITNEY with NO HAIR!!!!!


What baaastids....

....Nine months later the Chinese government put out revisions of its original proposal that reduced some of the contractual, collective bargaining and severance rights that were featured in the first proposal.

The transnational corporate and big business operatives in China openly claimed credit for the changes.

“We have enough investment at stake that we can usually get someone to listen to us if we are passionate about an issue,” Scot Slipy, Microsoft’s director of human resources in China, explained to a reporter from Business Week last year.

The changes made by the Chinese government in its original draft proposals are a “significant improvement,” declared the U.S.-China Business Council last December.

According to the GLS report, a lawyer representing numerous corporations in China recently said, “Comments from the business community appear to have had an impact. Whereas the March 2006 draft offered a substantial increase in the protection for employees and a greater role for unions than existing law, the new draft scaled back protections for employees and sharply curtailed the role of unions.”

[Donald Ian Rankin]

2. It doesn't say what the laws are, or what the changes to them were.

This makes me sceptical about it.