Yue Yuen Industrial strike
Walmart dispute ends China’s season of industrial unrest
The neighbourhood officials, who enforce Chinese Communist party diktats at street level, carried pictures of the workers and conveyed a simple message to them and their families: don't interfere in Walmart's removal of goods from the store, which closed in March, and accept the retailer's enhanced settlement offer of Rmb3,000 ($480) each for "legal fees" incurred during the three-month dispute.
Chinese officials say they support neither side in the Walmart dispute in Changde and insist that the retailer's former workers, who are demanding greater compensation, are free to fight for their rights through legal channels. But as evidenced by the neighbourhood committees' interventions last week, the government is keen to bring closure to what has been a long, hot spring of industrial unrest.
The Yue Yuen Industrial strike, over alleged underpayment of social security benefits, involved tens of thousands of workers, illustrating the potential power of China's fragmented but rapidly evolving labour movement.
The country's only officially sanctioned union, the normally reticent All China Federation of Trade Unions, has traditionally urged workers to seek compromise in disputes with management, even if its members are unhappy with the outcome. The Changde dispute has attracted global attention in large part because of the unusually pugnacious approach taken by the store's ACFTU branch.
"With the economy slowing and workers more conscious of their legal rights, labour disputes will become even more common," says Pang Kun, a labour rights lawyer not involved in the Walmart case. "But the internal political climate and the government's emphasis on 'stability maintenance' means that worker protests are likely to be suppressed as soon as they arise."
The Changde case came to a head at an arbitration hearing on May 27 when the head of the outlet's union, Huang Xingguo, squared off against Walmart's lawyers from King & Wood Mallesons, an elite Chinese law firm. The retailer had offered the affected workers one month's pay for every year served, plus another month's salary. About sixty of the store's original 130 employees have accepted the offer.
Mr Huang proudly wore his employee badge at the hearing, which had been moved to a large classroom at a local technical college to accommodate the 69 holdouts. Most of them were women who came dressed in their red Walmart shirts. "Walmart says it values its employees," Zhou Qun, one of the employees, said as she waited for the session to begin. "But as soon as they don't need you, they just discard you."
Walmart insists that it strictly adhered to its legal obligations in closing about 20 underperforming outlets – part of a restructuring in which it also intends to open another 110 stores and hire 19,000 more workers over three years. Part of the workers case hinges on a technical argument about whether the outlet had been "closed" or "dissolved". Walmart, Mr Huang and his lawyers argued, originally used the latter term, which they say means the store's assets should be seized by the government and auctioned off.
For its part, Walmart argued that Mr Huang's chapter cannot bring a collective action case against it because almost half of the store's workforce accepted the retailer's original settlement offer. After the hearing, Walmart's lawyers declined an interview request.
Source: cnbc.com
