Collective Wage Bargaining and State-Corporatism in Contemporary China

Collective wage bargaining is an old, yet alien concept for Chinese enterprises. It is old because it was put forward as early as in the 1980s and formalized in the 1994 Labour Law. Nonetheless, collective wage bargaining was alien to most Chinese enterprises because according to the 1994 Labour Law the implementation of collective wage bargaining was voluntary and few enterprises carried it out in practice. This situation did not change until 2000 when the Chinese government issued the Tentative Measures for Collective Wage Bargaining. The Measures dusted off the notion of collective wage bargaining and in 2007, the Labour Contract Law finally institutionalized collective wage bargaining in China. According to the 2007 Labour Contract Law, a collective consultation with assemblies of employee representatives or all employees is required before an employer can adjust an employee's salary. Collective wage bargaining is defined in the Chinese labour regulations as " the communication and consultation behaviour on labour standards, working conditions, as well as other issues related to labour relations between employing units (including enterprises, individual economic organizations, private non-enterprise units, etc.) and the corresponding trade union organizations (or representatives democratically elected by employees in the enterprise that has not set up unions) on the basis of full legal equality according to state laws and regulations " (MLSS, 2000: 1). The result of collective wage bargaining is usually formalized as collective contract between employers and employees. To be noted that, collective wage bargaining is