UAW Presses China on Workers' Rights
President Bush and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick are quick to tout free trade as a means of spreading democratic values throughout the world. Yet the Bush administration has adopted a “see no evil, hear no evil” approach to the repression of fundamental human rights by one of the United States' largest trading partners, the People's Republic of China.
The past five years have seen dramatic growth in U.S.-China trade — especially China's exports. In 2000, China surpassed Japan as the single largest source of the U.S. trade deficit, and last year's trade deficit with China topped $83 billion.
But while China has emerged as a major player in the global economy, its human rights record has gotten worse, not better as Bush and other free traders promised. Indeed, China has jailed more trade unionists than any other country in the world.
On Oct. 7, UAW President Ron Gettelfinger called on Bush to press China's President Jiang Zemin on behalf of “all those workers who are languishing in Chinese prisons — their only ‘crime': fighting for internationally recognized labor rights.”
Among them:
Peng Shi, an electrical worker, was sentenced to life imprisonment for leading a worker protest at the Xiangtan Electrical Machinery Plant.
Yue Tianxiang was sentenced to 10 years for helping workers demand unpaid wages from Tianshui Auto Transport Co. and for publishing the newsletter, Chinese Workers' Monitor.
Hu Shigen, a professor at the Beijing Languages Institute, was sentenced to 20 years for organizing the Free Labor Union of China.
“Some of those prisoners,” Gettelfinger wrote Bush, “are forced to work in slave labor camps producing goods that, in some instances, are exported to the United States.
“As American workers struggle to defend their jobs and living standards in the global economy, China's heavy reliance on this prison labor not only strips Chinese citizens of basic freedoms, but also creates horribly unfair international competition that undermines the livelihoods of American families.”
For more information, visit the Labor Rights Now web site at www.LaborRightsNow.org and the UAW web site at www.uaw.org
