crossposted from
unbossed
China and labor are often in the news. Usually this involves criticism for unfair competition with US workers based on extremely low wages. What has been missing is coverage of China's current efforts to draft a new labor contract law that could change these conditions.
For years, Chinese employers have tried to avoid the impact employment law by hiring workers as "temporary" employees. Employers give workers a series of fixed-term contracts so that a worker could spend a whole lifetime at one employer and never be a regular employee. The new law tries to address this and other abuses in a number of ways.
During the past year, high-level ministers from various Chinese departments have been engaged in a meticulous fact-finding mission that has involved travel to other countries to learn how their labor and employment laws work.
An overview of current Chinese labor law may be found here. An overview of the proposed law may be found here.
The draft labor contract law has come in for a barrage of heavy criticism from US business groups for being business-unfriendly. Put in plain English, being business-unfriendly means giving rights and better working conditions to workers.
Here are a few examples of the discussion.
Hewitt Associates, a "global human resources outsourcing and consulting firm", provides a position paper that may be found here.
It notes that China does not have at-will employment but rather has used labor contracts. Hewitt's position paper criticizes attempts to limit the ability of employers to avoid China's existing law by using the fiction of a series of fixed-term contracts. Actually, this is my paraphrase of what they are saying. They word it a little differently.
The US-China Business Council criticizes the new law on many grounds. The include:
requiring severance pay,
shortening the probationary period during which an employee can be fired without cause,
limiting the right of employers to demand that employees who quit must pay the employer for any "training" they received, and
placing limits on the scope of noncompete agreements in terms of geographic scope and damages to be paid to the employer by the employee who goes to work for a competitor.
The USBC also advocates limiting the power of unions to represent workers.
If you want a fairly neutral overview of the law, Baker & McKenzie's may be found here.
This is all flying under the radar screen for most of us. However, China is playing a critically important role in world ecoomics, and that role will only increase in importance. Workplace terms in China are affecting those elsewhere, including the US.
We need to be mindful of this - as well as of simple fair treatment for workers - and support this law. Certainly the international business community is already girded for battle.