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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 9 Hansard (7 September) . . Page.. 3052 ..
MR OSBORNE (continuing):
The Constitution provides for "freedom of association;" however, in practice this right is subject to the interests of the State and the leadership of the Communist Party. The Communist Party controls the country's sole officially recognised worker's organization, the All China Federation of Trade Unions. The head of the ACFTU is a member of the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the Communist Party...
Here, independent trade unions are illegal. The report continues:
The 1993 Trade Union Law required that the establishment of unions at any level be submitted to a higher level trade union organization for approval,-
I look forward to that piece of legislation coming from the Labor Party soon, Mr Speaker-
and only approved registered unions are legal. The ACFTU subsumes under its authority 16 industry-based and 31 provincial-level labor unions. They, in turn, have jurisdiction over roughly 586,000 "grassroots" labor unions nationwide...
It goes on to say:
The Government has not approved the establishment of any independent unions to date.
On the next page, Mr Speaker, it says this:
The Government continued its efforts to stamp out illegal union activity, including through detention or arrest of labor activists.
I hope Mr Berry, in particular, is sitting up there listening to this. It continues:
For example, activists Li Jinhua and Yan Jinhong were sentenced in January to reeducation-through-labor for 18 months and 12 months, respectively. The two had been arrested in 1998 after leading steelworkers in Sichuan to protest unpaid wages by blocking a railway.
The hide of them. The hide of the union people blockading a railway because they were not paid. What's going on with the world? I continue:
Zhang Xucheng was arrested for participating in the same protest and still is awaiting sentencing. Also in January, Zhang Shanguang, the founder of the short-lived Association to Protect the Rights and Interests of Laid-off Workers, unsuccessfully appealed the 10-year prison sentence he received in December 1998. Zhang had been convicted of "illegally providing intelligence to a foreign organization" after informing a Radio Free Asia reporter about worker protests in Hunan province. In April workers in Tianjin announced the formation of the Chinese Association to Protect Worker's Rights. In July labor activist and China Democracy Party member Liao Shaohua was arrested on subversion charges after taking part in a workers' demonstration outside the provincial government building in Changsha, Hunan. He was sentenced to a total of 6 years on December 22.
How is that for workers' rights, Mr Speaker?
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