Study On Several Aspects Of China Labor Relations From The Angle Of CSR Campaign

In this thesis, Corporate Social Responsibility means: besides maximizing the interests of stockholders, enterprises should take the legal and moral responsibility to protect and promote the interests of other stakeholders. Laborers are the most important stakeholders without stocks, because they create enterprises' profits and social wealth directly.The concept of CSR appeared in western developed countries in the early of 20th century. Since 1990s, with the development of economic globalization, CSR campaign began to influence Chinese enterprises. In 2004, internal medias intensively focused on "SA8000", enterprise leaders, the academicians in the fields of management, labor laws and economics paid more attention to the CSR and CSR campaign.The research of this thesis begins from the background of the CSR campaign. The main concerned point is the possible impacts the promotion of CSR campaign would bring to any aspects of Chinese labor relations. Based on all these analyses, this thesis try to point out some corresponding strategies to dealing with this western originated CSR campaign.Generally this thesis includes three parts. The first part begins with the analysis of the background, mainly analyzed the promoting mechanism of CSR campaign. This part also include the generalizing of the essence and characteristics of CSR campaign, of course, based on the promoting mechanism analysis.Firstly, some research on the promoting powers and promoting mechanism of CSR campaign is needed, so to get the knowledge about how the CSR campaign would affect the Chinese enterprises management and labor rights protection. This thesis try to found a simple model of the promoting mechanism, and do some detailed analysis about different promoting powers' role in the model and their different functioning ways.The pressure from consumers to multi-national companies and the pressure from multi-national companies to their suppliers and manufacturers both are direct economic pressures along the merchandise chain. Besides, investors' capital votes and the policy guidance of the importing countries would bring direct influence to multi-national companies. All of these are the main promoting powers of the international CSR campaign. The international organizations, like ILO, play an indirect role in the promoting of CSR campaign. And at present, those NGOs and some civilian observing organizations who drew up the CSR rules take the core role in the development of CSR campaign.Based on all above analysis, the essence of present CSR campaign could be concluded as a kind of reconstruction of the way for enterprises to realize their interests, promoted by the development of the relations between enterprises and their stakeholders, and basically promoted by the consumer's campaign backwards along the international merchandise chain.In the second part, this thesis focused on the history and present status of Chinese enterprises taking social responsibility, and possible impacts of the CSR campaign's development on Chinese labor relationship. Laborers are the most important stakeholders and direct responsibility objects of enterprises. The voice of labor rights protection is the main power to promote the development of CSR campaign. From the found of the People's Republic of China to the end of 1970s, in a way of "enterprises take whole society", Chinese enterprises have taken more responsibilities than they could. From the Reform and Opening-up to the middle of 1990s, the boundless market need and the imperfect market rules and corporate laws gave enterprises the conditions to get great profit ignoring their responsibility to society and workers. But since the end of 1990s, with the development of enterprise ethic, the labor law and corporate law system, Chinese enterprises began to take the interests of non-stock stakeholders into account.The development of the CSR campaign in China would resulted in the progress of Chinese enterprises' HRM. Besides legal regulation, ethic rules would play anmore important role in harmonizing enterprises' labor relations. The CSR internally combined enterprises' ability to get profit with it's labor rights protection situation. Compared with the outside compulsion of the labor law, this internal combination makes enterprises change their traditional mind, take the labor rights protection as self-conscious behavior.Because of some disagreement between the CSR rules and Chinese labor standards, there are some worries about this disagreement would strike or destroy Chinese labor standards system. But in fact, almost all CSR rules basically ask enterprises to stand by the local labor law, even include some rules to solve the disagreement, so theoretically, the supposed strike and destroy would not happen. But take the different standards between Chinese labor law and western labor law and ILO core labor standards, some influence would be definite. On the labor rights standards, the CSR campaign would help Chinese workers to realize their rights of free association and collective bargaining, and in favor of their rights of collective action admitted. On the working condition rights, almost all CSR rules include payment and time as key content, we can expect that the CSR would benefit the solving of deficient payment, suspended payment and severe overtime, etc. At the same time, MNCs and their Chinese suppliers get into coalitions because of orders. The worked clauses on payment and time would increase ordering price. So we can't expect the MNCs promoted CSR campaign can thoroughly find solutions for the problems on Chinese working conditions.The industry of manufacturing-for-export in China has been developing with a condition of greatly relying on the low-cost labor resources in great rural area. At present, the labors affected by the CSR rules are mainly so-called farmer-workers. In the event the CSR campaign moving ahead in China, it would not only improving the living and working conditions of those farmer-workers in the exporting industry, but also the whole farmer-worker collection.The third part analyzed the advantages and disadvantages in China's practical environment to promote the CSR, and talked about some adjustments for governmentand enterprises to positively deal with the CSR standards. For law maker, it's necessary to embody the CSR into corporate law system, protect workers right to take part in enterprises management, create basic labor protection law. For governments, it's very necessary to found and push China's own CSR authorizing system, enforce the labor law execution and inspection, encourage and support the development of the consumer associations. For enterprises, they must take labor rights protection as it's basic social responsibility, build it's performance appraisal index system from the standpoint of stakeholders, and take labor rights protection into enterprises' daily schedule.