Peter Ford

Peter Ford is the Christian Science Monitor’s Beijing bureau chief, and has been in China for the past two years. In a career as a foreign correspondent spanning nearly 25 years Ford has reported for the CSM, the Financial Times, the Independent and The Economist from South and Central America, the Middle East, Russia and Europe.

Danwei asked the veteran journalist some questions about subjects that he has been writing about recently: trade unions, unemployment and social unrest in China.

Do you think that the Labor Contract Law implemented January 1, 2008, will be affected by the economic downturn — as in, it will no longer be relevant in the face of mass unemployment?

I have heard, though not been able to confirm, that provincial governments have been quietly telling employers for several months that if they do not abide by the provisions of the Labor Contract Law they need not worry, and this seems perfectly plausible.

A lot of employers have been complaining for a year or so that the labor law, along with the rising value of the RMB until last July, was a major factor in making them uncompetitive.

That may be true of the low margin, low quality producers, and while the government clearly did not mind driving them out of business last year (so as to move China’s economy up the value chain) such firms do at least offer jobs while they are still in business, and jobs are going to be in short supply this year.

What do you think 2009 will mean for trade unions in China?

As in any country in the world suffering rising unemployment, trade unions in China are not going to find the atmosphere very conducive to activism. The government controls trade unions here, and has always reined them in to stop them causing trouble for the investors and employers who have been fueling economic growth.

It is just conceivable, since the government’s top priority is always stability, that the authorities could see increased trade union activity as a manageable way of venting worker frustration at low wages, job insecurity, and so on, but I doubt it. Most workers are going to be happy over the next few months just to have a job.

Do you think that trade unions can actually benefit workers in China?

Some unions in some work units have begun to try collective bargaining, which is the most basic way in which unions elsewhere in the world benefit their workers, but which is still practically unknown in China. They have not enjoyed much support, though, from the national leadership of the All China Federation of Trade Unions, one of whose officials told me recently “we coordinate labor relations, we do not fight against management.”

Who really controls trade unions here?

The government. The government. The government.

Too many articles these days are dealing with the topic of social unrest in China. Do you think unemployment and social unrest will be the big media topic of 2009?

Yes, although it will not be easy to gauge the real scope of these phenomena. There will be many, widely divergent, estimates of unemployment from a variety of official and semi-official and unofficial sources. Tracking social unrest will also be hard, even though the official media have recently begun to publish far more stories about protests and riots than they used to. If they start to get out of hand, though, I would not expect the Chinese media to maintain this openness indefinitely.

Nor do I think that outbursts of social unrest, even if they are widespread, spell doom for the Communist party, which has so far proved pretty good at managing the political ramifications of economic distress. The government has survived worse than the coming troubles with no difficulty: 65 million employees of state-owned enterprises lost their jobs a decade or so ago, and not even the most pessimistic observers are predicting that scale of job losses from the current slowdown.