Foxconn’s proposal to allow workers to elect their own union representatives, writes the FT, is viewed as a ‘response to frequent worker protests, riots and strikes and soaring labor costs.’
Is China moving ahead of the United States on worker rights? According to a report on Monday’s Financial Times, it may be doing just that.
The FT reports that Foxconn, which employs 1.2 million Chinese workers who make the bulk of Apple’s products, along with those of Nokia, Dell and other tech companies, has decided to allow its workers to hold elections to select their union leaders. This is a radical departure from past practice in China, where unions are run by the government—that is, the Communist Party—which customarily selects the union leaders. Often, the leaders selected under this system are actually the plant managers.
Under Foxconn’s new plan, workers will cast secret ballots for their union leaders, and no managers will be eligible to run. The company’s proposal, writes the FT, is viewed as a “response to frequent worker protests, riots and strikes and soaring labor costs.” In other words, just as employers in Western Europe and the U.S. once came to prefer dealing with unions to dealing with spontaneous shutdowns arising from worker discontent, so Foxconn has decided the better part of valor is to deal with representatives of the workers whom the workers actually view as their legitimate representatives.