The ACFTU has typically done little to protect the rights of laborers in disputes, despite a mandate to do so, experts and workers say.
Over the past several years, China’s union has sat on the sidelines as workers, emboldened by a demographic shift that has led to a shrinking labor pool, have become more knowledgeable about their rights and proactive in using both collective action and the legal system to protect them. Because Huang is a union branch leader, the case is also a challenge to the world’s largest and China’s only legal union, the 260 million-member All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). 2024, and was democratically elected to the post, which makes him even rarer. Huang is chairman of the state-backed union at Walmart store No.
Worker protests are common in China, but leaders like Huang are not. The Changde case would not just set a precedent for Wal-Mart, but for other foreign companies seeking to restructure their operations in response to a slowing Chinese economy. The Chinese government used Wal-Mart as a fillip for greater unionization at foreign firms. Unions first opened at its stores in 2006 during a major government-led drive to unionize private companies. In China, as in other countries, Wal-Mart Stores Inc has figured prominently in the debate over worker rights. It’s not the biggest labor dispute China has seen in a recent surge of activism that has included factory strikes involving thousands of workers, but experts say it’s among the more significant. REUTERS/Courtesy of Huang Xingguo/Handout via Reutersįive years later, he has landed on the frontlines of China’s labor rights movement, an unlikely leader of several dozen workers seeking better severance pay after the store in the Hunan province city of Changde announced last month it was closing. Huang Xingguo (back L) talks to workers outside a closed Walmart store in Changde, Hunan province in this handout photo taken on Maprovided by Huang to Reuters on April 6, 2014.
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