Over the past decade or more, watchdogs of corporate activity, governments, business leaders and non-governmental organizations have all struggled with how best to deal with human rights abuses caused by business activities. One response has been the Corporate and Social Responsibility (CSR) movement. A plethora of CSR actors now exist: with a wide array of codes of conduct, multi-stakeholder initiatives, and labelling schemes. And although the CSR movement has made many positive contributions, it is now at a turning point.

Up to 500 employees at hi-tech giant Intel’s factory in Chengdu, Sichuan staged a one day strike last month in a protest over wage discrepancies with employees recently transferred in from the multi-national’s Shanghai facility, according to a report in China Business Journal. The workers claimed that the employees from Shanghai were being paid up to four times more for the same production line positions.

A university student-worker at Coca-Cola’s bottling plant in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, was threatened and beaten by the managers of a labour supply company after he sought wages in arrears on behalf of himself and his colleagues, the Hong Kong-based pressure group Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) reported today.

Corporate and Social Responsibility is steadily gaining acceptance in China, but for CSR to effectively protect workers rights it must encourage the active participation of workers in the process. Photo by Photograffiti Shanghai

In 2005 China Labour Bulletin launched a pilot programme designed to assist and complement the aims of the growing corporate social accountability movement in China by promoting the use of collective employment contracts in the China-based supplier firms of multinational companies. Our initial intention was to work with multinational companies in setting up a factory-based mechanism to facilitate collective bargaining between labour and management that would lead to the conclusion of wide-ranging collective contracts on wages.

China Labour Bulletin publishes a new report on China's collective labour contract system, highlighting the need for genuine worker participation...