Rights at Work: Promoting Harmonious Labour Relations through Collective Bargaining in China

The project aims to build the institutional capacity of Chinese workers, employers, and their respective organizations to carry out voluntary collective bargaining and to resolve labour disputes efficiently and effectively. It further aims to support the ILO’s tripartite constituents in China to strengthen collective bargaining institutions and governance frameworks for the promotion and improved application of core labour standards, especially in relation to disadvantaged groups of workers such as women and rural migrants. A key contribution of the project is to enhance the collective bargaining strategies and agendas of workers’ organizations to ensure the interests of these workers are better represented in collective contracts and to facilitate their meaningful participation in bargaining processes. The focus of the project’s activities will be training workers and employers and their organizations to undertake three pilot models of sectoral and locality-based collective bargaining. This piloting strategy is suitable in the Chinese context given policymakers’ greater openness to smaller-scale experimentation in institution building. The sectoral pilots will take place in certain ‘strategic growth’ sectors, namely automotive parts (higher value-added manufacturing) and courier logistics/delivery (services and e-commerce). A mixture of state-owned enterprises, private enterprises, foreign invested enterprises, and joint ventures can be found in the two sectors. The workforces also consist of various forms of non-standard employment, with a high proportion of young rural migrants and women workers. To enhance the implementation of the pilot programmes, the project will also incorporate research and information sharing through a comparative case study analysis of best practices and the organization of an international conference that will shed comparative insights into collective bargaining and dispute resolution systems in China and other countries. The main outputs of the project will be a series of training modules and tailored advice to build the capacity of collective bargaining representatives involved in the pilot programmes. The training will help the representatives develop their agenda and action plans for collective bargaining and dispute resolution. Their experiences will be documented, analysed, and shared with tripartite constituents at various levels and a wider group of stakeholders that are involved in labour relations such as NGOs, mediators, arbitrators, legal practitioners, etc. Based on the outcomes of the pilot programmes and a comparative analysis of collective bargaining and dispute resolution regulatory frameworks, a policy paper will be produced for the tripartite constituents to discuss developments and improvements in higher-level (such as national and provincial) laws, policies, institutions and governance frameworks. The project will be implmeneted for 36 months with a budget of USD 1,455,518.

Project symbol

CHN/15/03/USA

Admin unit

CO-Beijing

Start date

29/08/2016

End date

29/02/2020

Total allocation

760524

Total expenditure

Status

Closed

760524

Development Partners

US Government

Country/Countries

China

Outcomes

Outcome 1: Strong tripartite constituents and influential and inclusive social dialogue