Honda workers in China are unionized. The ones in the US are not

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/11/AR2010061105718.html

Strike at Honda plant the latest sign of labor unrest in China

By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 12, 2010

BEIJING -- Labor strikes continued to spread Friday across parts of China, as newly emboldened workers pressed for higher wages and better conditions, posing a fresh challenge to the government and the country's only officially sanctioned union.

In Zhangshan, in southeastern China, about 1,700 workers at a factory that makes locks and keys for Honda Motors staged an unusual march through the city streets Friday morning, media reports and labor activists said.

The workers walked off the job Wednesday, demanding more pay and the right to elect their own union representatives. That was a direct affront to the country's official union, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions.

Two Honda plants in Guangdong province remain idle because of work stoppages.

[Taitertots]

1. They don't even get to pick their representatives, if you could call them that

Can you even call it a union if it is not representative of the workers and doesn't take their wishes into consideration?

[Warpy]

2. Workers are fighting against that part

and strikes like the one in the OP are becoming more common. They were unheard of just 10 years ago.

China's "economic miracle" of a few people getting unimaginably rich while peasants and workers endure slave labor conditions and are kept outside the moneyed class has just about run its course. The official union already had them semi organized. It's not much of a leap for the workers to take it over with their own people as representatives and this is what is occurring.

[Imajika]

3. Your thread title is terrible...

...and does not at all reflect what the article is about.

From the article:

"Also significant, according to Geoffrey Crothall, a spokesman for the China Labor Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based advocacy group, is that workers have as a central demand the right to elect their union representatives. That is a rebuke of the official union that ostensibly represents workers in China, but in reality has long acted as a partner of factory managers and local government officials to ensure labor peace.

Without a real union standing up for worker rights, the analysts said, no mechanism exists in China for employees to bring grievances to management, other than through strikes."

They do not have a real union, they can't even elect their own representatives. They have the "official" government sanctioned union which the people have no voice in.

[David__77]

4. ACFTU has better coopt this.

China has enormous leverage to raise wages for workers in foreign-invested enterprises right now. They have sunk a lot of investment and can be forced to concede a lot. A balance must be struck. ACFTU has to move from being a union primarily working as it did when enterprises were almost all state-owned or collective in nature. If it cannot defend workers interest in a situation in which there is clearly a capitalist/worker contradiction, what is the point of it?