会议专题

Corporate Governance and Trade Unions in Foreign Companies in China

This article explores effectiveness of the unionisation campaign of the Chinese union over improvement of labour rights. Through analysis on two case studies, the article challenges traditional wisdom on communist union behaviours, and argues that power interaction with companies need to be considered, since unionisation is an important approach for the Chinese union to increase its power leverage by achieving economic accumulation through more membership dues paid by the firms, along with political strength accumulation through expanding the membership base to traditionally non-unionised TNCs. During this power interaction of industrial relations actors, the union has become an interest group, whose interests are not necessarily the same as those of Chinese workers. As a result, the union undertakes flexible unionisation strategy to maximise its own interests and minimise unionisation spends, while workers are just one factor of this expense-and-return calculation of the union. Unionisation of TNCs does not translate into the rise of collective labour rights, as well as improvement of labour standards.

Wu Qingjun

School of Labour and Human Resources ,Renmin University of China,Beijing,P.R.China,100872

国际会议

The 7th International Conference on Innovation and Management(第七届创新与管理国际会议 ICIM 2010)

武汉

英文

903-912

2010-12-04(万方平台首次上网日期,不代表论文的发表时间)