Prospects for US-China Union Relations in the Era of Xi and Trump

Abstract

In October 2013, Richard Trumka, President of the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL- CIO), visited the AllChina Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) to establish formal bilateral relations between unions in China and the United States. This visit signalled an historic shift in labour policy, from Cold War- style hostility to normalisation of relations. Some American labour activists hoped that it might further lead to collaboration on joint activities, such as collective bargaining. That collaboration would be a significant step forward in labour solidarity and building a global labour movement. However since then progress towards building relations has been decidedly slow. There have been only a couple of official exchanges with the AFLCIO , and activities sponsored by Change To Win (CTW), the splinter group of the AFL-CIO that first began relations with the ACFTU a decade ago, have decreased. Some American labour leaders have noted that the ACFTU has become less interested in collective bargaining since Xi Jinping’s campaign against corruption began. Now, given Donald Trump’s election as US President with his agenda to weaken the American labour movement and start a trade war with China, it is fair to ask whether there are any prospects for progress in relations between unions in China and the US, and if so where. A Troubled History The root of American attitudes towards Chinese labour have been shaped by race, class, and ideology. Since the nineteenth century there have been xenophobic fears of the ‘Yellow Peril’ represented by Chinese workers, as well as arguments that workers of European ancestry should cast their lot with American business and shut out Chinese workers. These fears were compounded in 1949, when China became a communist state and an ideological enemy, resulting in antipathies that linger to this day. After World War II, the Cold War set in, and the world was divided into two main ideological camps: the communist and the ‘free world’. In 1949, American unions led a split in the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) - a global union that aspired to bring together unions from all over the world into a single organisation—to form the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), an alliance of free world unions. Meanwhile, the WFTU came to be known as the federation of communist unions. The ICFTU consistently criticised the ACFTU for not being a free and independent trade union, and therefore declared that it was not an ‘authentic’ voice of Chinese workers. However, in 1979, when China opened its doors to foreign investment and diplomatic relations with the US were established, the material basis for this divide changed. Multinational corporations raced to China to take advantage of the low-cost labour. Factory conditions were appalling and workers were exploited, causing outcry among international consumer and human rights activists, and drawing criticism of the Chinese government and its unions for not protecting workers. At a time when international labour solidarity might have meant American workers reaching out to workers in China, American unions continued to refuse to have anything to do with Chinese unions, repeating the Cold War rhetoric that they were neither independent nor authentic. Meanwhile, some left-leaning labour organisers worked quietly in the background to coordinate worker-to-worker exchanges between US and Chinese workers, hoping to build solidarity. The Tiananmen Incident in 1989 proved to be a setback for these budding relations. The crackdown on the protests was viewed worldwide on cable news in real time, and its brutality reinforced what many American labour unionists had believed all along— that despite capitalist markets and openness to meeting foreigners, China was still an authoritarian state that did not respect human rights. The AFLCIO response was to support a few Chinese labour activists in exile, and to continue to boycott relations with Chinese unions. At that time, American unions supported campaigns targeting international brands, pressuring these companies to accept corporate social responsibility in their supply chains. The theory was that the brands had power to control labour conditions in factories that manufactured their products. In Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, these cross-border campaigns, mostly led not by unions but by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), had...