as it has in the past thirty years. Nevertheless, due to the increasing marketization of the Chinese economy, the ACFTU has been confronted with a rapidly changing environment. With reform efforts drastically transforming the previously planned economy, the formerly homogenous Chinese workforce has become increasingly diversified, creating problems of representation for such a centralized organization as the ACFTU (Howell, 2003). Tripartite between government, management, and trade union may cause legitimacy to be questioned by employers and workers for different reasons. Workers trust in the state controlled union will be limited for fear that it does not represent its interest but rather that of management and/or the government as the union is caught in the dilemma set out by the rules and regulations governing its existence. Management, on the other hand, next to the standard reservations against unions, may fear close ties to the government and worry about potential state interference (Ge, 2007). Several authors such as Metcalf and Li (2005) will however argue that the interaction between unions and its members is practically non-existent, while unions tend to operate on behalf of the government and management instead. These circumstances put unions in a situation which is prone to a conflict of interests making it difficult to truly represent its actual constituency when bargaining with management.
4.2 Role of Grass-root Trade Unions
exploring what role Chinese unions are currently doing, this paper will first highlight the tasks outlined by legislation and regulations set out by the ACFTU itself, followed by a critical evaluation of its present role as well as the limitations set out by the conditions influencing the current situation on the Chinese labor market.the past decade the Chinese labor law as well as the role of unions has been transforming. But a serious gap of what trade unions are entitled to do and what they do in reality persists, as this paper will try to demonstrate below. Today, as the ACFTU constitution states, the union s basic responsibility is to protect workers legal rights and interest. This then is reflected in the union s core activities outlined in Article 28 of the constitution, including assistance in mediation of labor disputes, education programs, legal supervision, and workers representation during collective contract negotiations. The majority of the activities include dealing with malpractice in employment and poor working conditions which have been recognized as factors contributing to unstable labor relations (Dan, 2003). Basically, a core function of Chinese trade unions is to act as a watch-dog for the implementation of labor laws and to provide workers a pressure valve t...
