More Versatile Trade Unions

More Versatile Trade Unions

Oriental Outlook June 23

Shenzhen, the first of China’s special economic zones, in south China’s Guangdong Province, hosts over 10 million factory workers. A new generation of migrant workers has come to form a majority of the labor force. The new workers, who have received better education than their predecessors and have grown accustomed to urban life, have stronger awareness of their rights as well as more diversified aspirations.

In order to provide better services for these workers, Shenzhen’s municipal trade union has recruited college graduates, including some from prestigious universities such as Peking University, to become professional trade union representatives tasked with promoting trade union reforms and organizing workers to form closer bonds. In order to win workers’trust, the newly recruited trade union representatives have strived to attract workers to participate through a publicity campaign involving popular social networking platforms such as QQ and WeChat.

In addition, they have helped factory workers form hobby groups

“The real opportunity for China is that the great creative entrepreneurship that exists here not only serves the Chinese market but now increasingly serves the world market.”

Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of U.S.-based Web security provider CloudFlare, at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin on June 26

“We will try to make this process efficiently managed and handled, and we will encourage our member states, when implementing security standards, to think of facilitation.”

Liu Fang, Secretary General of the International Civil Aviation Organization, commenting on airport security procedures in a recent interviewfor activities including yoga, badminton, running, hiking and English practice. By the middle of 2016, the number of workers participating in such activities had increased to some 1,000 per week in a pilot community, accounting for 1 percent of the community’s total workforce.

Through the experiment, the municipal trade union expects to make breakthroughs in wage negotiations, labor dispute resolution and enriching employees’ spare time as well as to develop a set of guidelines that can be replicated elsewhere.