[From the NYT] May 20, 2001 China Accepts U.N. Advice to Help Ease Labor Strife By ERIK ECKHOLM EIJING, May 19 - China dismissed questions about its harsh controls over union organizing this week as it agreed to an ambitious program of cooperation with an international labor agency intended to improve the welfare of the country's huge and troubled work force. Under the new agreement, the International Labor Office, a United Nations agency charged with promoting worker rights and well-being, will become engaged in some of China's most explosive social issues, related to the growing turmoil in the work force. Illegal strikes and protests have become common as the country moves from a state-controlled economy, which promised workers cradle-to-grave security, to a market-driven system that has thrown tens of millions out of their jobs and left many others toiling in arduous or unsafe conditions. According to the agreement signed on Thursday, the international agency will step up exchanges and advice on job creation, social security, workplace safety and, the document says, such sensitive topics as collective bargaining and the settlement of labor disputes. "We're going to open up a kind of dialogue that never existed here before between China and the I.L.O.," Juan Somavia, the director general of the agency, said at the signing ceremony here. But Chinese authorities appear determined to fend off any probing of a central issue: the ban on labor organizing outside the single, Communist Party-sponsored trade union. The tensions that may dog future cooperative programs were already evident at the ceremony. China's minister of labor and social security, Zhang Zuoji, acknowledged serious problems in the workplace, listing as top priorities the creation of more jobs and the strengthening of a new pension plan, unemployment insurance and other systems that are essential to repair the tattered Socialist safety net. Mr. Zhang said his country welcomed dialogue on human rights, but he flatly rejected Mr. Somavia's statement that China's restrictive union rules violated basic principles of free association - principles that are seen by most labor experts worldwide as crucial to the protection of workers' interests. Under Chinese law, devised to enforce stability and the primacy of the Communist Party, workers may join only the single, government-controlled trade-union federation. Independent groups, even where the official union is corrupt or fails to protect workers, have been crushed and rebellious labor leaders have been jailed. "Chinese labor law establishes a system of trade union monopoly, outside which workers may not organize legally," Mr. Somavia said, adding that he would push for change while also working with the government on less contentious issues like workplace safety. But Mr. Zhang, voicing the government line, insisted that Chinese workers "have freedom of association, in conformity with Chinese conditions." "We cannot accept the prejudices that some international organizations and some individuals hold against China and its practices," Mr. Zhang said. Mr. Somavia gave the Chinese government a list of 24 prisoners who the International Labor Office says have been jailed for labor organizing, and asked for their immediate release. In one example cited by the agency, Zhang Shanguang - who set up an association for the rights of laid-off workers in Hunan Province and described worker protests on an American radio broadcast - was sentenced in December 1998 to 10 years in prison for "revealing state secrets." Mr. Zhang, the labor minister, said, "Investigations have shown that there are no people detained or jailed because of legitimate participation in trade union activities." Anyone imprisoned had "violated laws and regulations," he said. The international agency also condemns China's reliance on forced labor in prisons and so-called re- education through labor camps. China has declined to sign a treaty, promoted by the Geneva office, that bars forced labor, though it plans to adopt conventions on child labor, discrimination and safety and health. Mr. Zhang said there was no forced labor in China and that critics had misunderstood the role of labor camps in rehabilitating minor offenders. The United Nations group is not itself a donor of aid funds, but seeks to engage governments in what Mr. Somavia called strategic policies and to enlist other donors. As a first project under the new cooperative program, the Swiss government has provided $1.9 million for an effort to improve labor-management relations and human-resource policies of companies in Shanghai, Chongqing and Dalian.
