The mainland's sole official trade union will pay staff in its branches from next year and will gradually allow more leaders of the grass-roots unions under its umbrella to be elected by workers' representatives.

If passed into law, the regulations could trigger a major overhaul of the collective consultation system that has prevailed in China over the last two decades. Photo by Travel Geographer.

The name gives no hint of potential changes for workers’ rights. Yet the proposed Regulations on the Democratic Management of Enterprises, under debate in the Guangdong Provincial People’s Congress, offers Chinese labor a new bargaining tool: an officially sanctioned right to strike.

Officials in Guangdong province – for years the country's manufacturing heartland – are debating proposals which activists say could be a landmark, allowing workers to democratically elect representatives to carry out collective bargaining.

The week-long strike at Honda supplier Atsumitec ended Thursday after workers and management agreed to a 45 percent increase in the basic wage from 980 yuan a month to 1,420 yuan. And the Guangdong provincial government is currently drafting Regulations on the Democratic Management of Enterprises (广东省企业民主管理条例), which if implemented would establish a legally binding wage negotiation system.

Young migrant workers in Shenzhen, just like their parents, have to work long hours in hazardous conditions for low pay. The key difference between the generations, a new survey shows, is that the expectations of younger workers are much higher than their parents, seeking to establish a life for themselves in the city rather than return to the countryside.

As Honda workers in Guangdong savour their pay rises gained through strategy and persistence, strikes at Toyota supplier factories in Tianjin last week appeared much less organised and crumbled at the early intervention of police and officials. From the workers' perspectives, Guangdong and Tianjin could not be more different in terms of the way the strikes were handled and their effectiveness. Even within the same company, strikes at Toyota parts suppliers in the southern manufacturing hub this week led to a three-day production halt at Guangqi Toyota, while similar strikes in the northeastern municipality held out only long enough to delay production at FAW Toyota by one day.

"Every month we pay five yuan out of our pockets to the union, but I don't know what for," fumed a worker at the Honda Auto Parts factory in Foshan , Guangdong, where workers went on strike last month. Workers at the factory, which employs about 1,900 people, downed tools to demand a pay rise. Things turned sour when representatives of the local branch of the official Communist Party-controlled All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) stepped in to mediate but ended up scuffling with workers. Some workers said union staff had beaten them. "That was bizarre," said the worker, referring to the incident. "I don't know who those people were and I don't know what they do."

Workers at a second Toyota plant in Tianjin went on strike on Thursday 17 June, causing production to be suspended. A brief strike at Toyota’s steering wheel manufacturer in Tianjin earlier on 15 June ended when management agreed to consider workers’ demands for higher pay. However, several workers at Tianjin Star Light Rubber and Plastic have expressed dissatisfaction with the pace of negotiations and are threatening to strike again if their demands are not met. Meanwhile, the trade union at the Honda components plant in Foshan, which did nothing to help workers in their successful strike action last month, is to be reformed and its leaders democratically elected by the employees, a senior Guangdong union official has said.

City governments across China need to repay the debt owed to the migrant workers who have generated their tax revenues for so long, says prominent workers’ rights advocate Han Dongfang