Research On The Mechanism Of Labor Interests Protection Of Chinese Unions

With deepening reform of economic system, the way of recruitment and the form of employment present new different characteristics. Labor relations transform from individual to collective. Conflict between workers and employers intensified and the number of strikes rose. Part of labor disputes evolve into confrontational strikes and occur repeatedly. Under this background, the role of trade unions in protecting workers’ rights has been widely concerned. However, the existing literatures mainly focus on whether the unions have positive impact on protecting the rights and interests of workers, failing to further explaining the mechanisms behind. Little is known about how trade unions work. Therefore, this thesis pays close attention to the issue of the mechanisms of labor rights protection of China’s trade unions, and makes identification and assessment of different mechanisms of unions, which helps to clearly indicate the development direction of union construction and effective path of coordinating employment relations.Firstly, based on the summary of the theories of trade unions and related empirical researches, and review of China’s employment relations status and union development characteristics, the article sets up the analytical framework of the dual role of trade unions ("a monopoly face" and "a collective voice/institutional response face"). The enterprise-staff matching data, that is, Harmonious Index of Labor Relation Survey in Hangzhou in 2012 is adopted to identify and compare the two mechanisms of the unions through microeconometrics methods.In the part of empirical research, the article firstly investigates the effectiveness of monopoly power of unions in term of rights safeguard. Using propensity score matching method combined with approximate difference-in-differences method, endogenous problem caused by self-selection is corrected. The result shows that the collective wage consultation system has no significant effect on workers’ wage. So it can hardly play a positive role in improving the labor remuneration. On the basis of the foregoing research, the article then makes further explanation and analysis of collective voice mechanism with the same data. We mainly explore the democratic participation’s influence on staff incentive and adopt three stages least squares method to establish the simultaneous equations. The study finds that the unions’ collective voice/institutional response function can enhance productivity and organizational identification of workers through effective communication and incentive mechanism.Based on the theoretical and empirical analysis, this paper believes that collective voice is a more effective mechanism for trade unions to protect workers’ rights. The main purpose of construction and development of China’s trade union is not to increase the bargaining chips compared to employers by means of monopoly power, but to develop harmonious labor relations. Collective voice mechanism can give full play to the functions of trade unions in mild and non-confrontational ways. Consultation platforms between enterprises and employees are established to strengthen information exchange to both sides, reduce the labor conflicts, and protect the rights and interests of workers.