Retail giant Wal-Mart has signed a collective labour agreement with the trade union at one of its stores in China. The landmark agreement at the Shenyang store in northeastern Liaoning province covers employee remuneration, annual pay rises, over-time, paid vacations and social security payments.

The lack of legal compulsion and the impotence of many enterprise level trade unions are making the implementation of the Chinese government's collective wage consultation system an uphill struggle, union officials in the central city of Luoyang have conceded. Photo by Saad Akhtar@flickr.com

Workers in China do not have the constitutional right to strike. Yet, every day in the Pearl River Delta alone there is at least one major strike involving over a thousand employees and dozens of smaller strikes and stoppages. Photograph by Sebi

Inflationary pressure has forced Shenzhen to raise the minimum wage, already the highest in China, by 20 percent to the unprecedented level of 1,000 yuan a month. However, simply raising the minimum wage will not be enough to guarantee workers even a basic standard of living.

Labour disputes and strikes are as natural as arguments between a husband and wife, the vice-chairman of the Shenzhen Federation of Trade Unions has said. In a speech reported by the Southern Metropolitan Daily, Wang Tongxin, called for a more relaxed approach to strikes, which he said were the inevitable result of market economics and something society would have to learn to accept.

Guangdong trade union officials have publicly acknowledged that the most effective way to protect workers' wages is through direct negotiations between labour and management. Will their actions match their words?

CLB director, Han Dongfang, argues that China needs genuine collective bargaining between labour and management to make the promise held out by the new Labour Contract Law a reality.

Union official admits the ACFTU was “helpless” to prevent a long running dispute at the Yueyang Steelworks in Shaanxi from developing into major strike with up to 3,000 workers blocking an inter-province highway for four days.

A provincial government has introduced new legislation that allows for democratically elected workers’ delegations to negotiate collective labour contracts with management. CLB hopes the local unions can use the new rules to engage in meaningful and effective bargaining with management

CLB's second research report on the the workers' movement in China documents the development of the movement from 2005 to 2006, and concludes that the time has now come for the ACFTU either to join that movement or to remain on the sidelines - an increasing irrelevance