A TRADE union impresses me as a setup aimed at strengthening our notion of harmony, by bestowing small gifts.

When I taught at a school about two decades ago, the union's gifts to teachers were two cakes of soap and a towel given every quarter.

A physical education teacher doubled as the chairman of the union, and obviously no one took the title very seriously, except the man himself.

In my subsequent employments, even this symbolic nature of a union becomes less salient.

The only sign of its existence may be the few kuai deducted of my wages as union dues.

My experience with unions is probably not atypical of China's 260 million unionized employees.

Accounting for 71 percent of the total workforce, that figure earns China the honor of being No. 1 globally in terms of sheer numbers of unionized workers.

The spate of strikes plaguing some of Honda's China plants and the suicide leaps at Foxconn tend to cast that honor in a dubious light.

For instance, in the strike that erupted May 17 at Honda's Foshan plant, workers halted to demand higher wages, but on May 31 about a hundred men with union badges (apparently hired thugs) stormed into the premises ordering the workers back to their jobs.

Three workers were hurt in the ensuing scuffle.

In an open letter dated June 3, the workers harshly condemned the trade union for "continuing to justify the injuries it inflicted on the striking workers," even while the union tried to apologize.

After this incident the workers demanded that the union be reorganized to truly represent the interests of the workers.

The incident proved highly illuminating.

Prior to this strike in Guangdong Province, most Honda workers had only a vague idea about what a trade union was about.

The union at the Honda plant was set up in 2008, when seven members of the plant management were "elected" as union leaders.

Not a single grassroots worker was among the candidates. The workers' subsistence monthly wages of 1,000 yuan (US$147) became the cause of the strike.

On May 24, when the plant's Japanese general manager faced the workers in a standoff, union chairman Wu Youhe acted as a mediator. A worker saw him "making obeisances to the general manager while taking instructions, and the mike in his hand magnified his repeated 'hums' of assent."

On other occasions Wu was seen to be hovering around the general manager.

This disturbing situation prompted some workers to consult China's Trade Union Law, and realized that a union should stand for the interests of the workers. Hence the call for a new union which really represents them.

The Honda strike also proved that in the absence of a true union, those activist workers involved in the labor disputes would be the first to be purged after the settlement.

Union mission lost

On the night of June 4, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) issued an emergency notice calling for greater trade union presence and autonomy ?? under the Party's leadership.

The notice came on the heels of Honda strikes and Foxconn suicides.

Prior to this, mainland Chinese primarily learned about strikes from their textbooks that described how the proletariat suffer at the hands of bloodsucking capitalists.

At a conference on June 12, Guangdong Provincial Party chief Wang Yang called for the trade unions to "correctly position" themselves to represent workers in their effort to assert their legitimate rights.

Ironically, according to Professor Chang Kai, a labor expert from Renmin University, this basic mission of a trade union was spelled out in the law from the very beginning.

The Trade Union Law promulgated in 2001 states, "The basic responsibility of trade unions is to safeguard the legitimate rights of the workers."

Thus although ACFTU is now global No. 1 in terms of scale, its challenge today is how to win the trust of its members it presumes to represent.

That can only start with real election of union leaders by the workers.

Professor Chang had been involved in helping broker a deal in the Honda strike, and he is under the impression that the essence of labor disputes is the isolation experienced by the workers.

"They feel no one is keen to protect their interests, and this feeling is made worse by poor working conditions."

Some workers increasingly feel powerless and impotent in the world's greatest proletariat dictatorship.

Labor expert professor Liu Wenyuan from China Institute of Industrial Relations also points to two developments that steadily erode the workers' bargaining power.

One is "capital hegemony," as evinced in the "excessive favor given to foreign capital." As attracting foreign investments is top priority in stated national policy, local governments compete with each other in showing off ever-more-favorable investment environment: cheap labor, low taxes, easy credit, and flexible pollution standards.

Another development is the domination by administrative power in state-owned enterprises, where the much marginalized union leaders tend to be busy currying favor with the management.

After all, union leaders are on the payroll of the enterprises, and cannot but do the bidding of the managers.

In some former state enterprises that have undergone reforms ?? sometimes a euphemism for shovelling public assets into private pockets ?? unions could fare worse. The unions there can be so underfunded that they cannot function.

Elusive solution

An ultimate solution is probably not readily at hand.

Given China's current addiction to growth, we could imagine that the call for more independent unions was largely motivated by the intention to harness the union as a force to quickly stabilize the workforce.

If we see across-the-board pay hikes for grassroots workers, this would raise the specter of inflation, which is already high.

And when labor is no longer cheap, China simply must learn to come to terms with a post-growth scenario, when it has to scrutinize the growth hailed as miraculous.

It would be found that the cost of labor has never been so cheap when factoring in the loss in human dignity, social justice, environmental protection, or the family ties once so dear to Chinese hearts.

Scholars rightly point out that much of recent growth is distributive, rather than creative.

That explains why, when the economy aspires to be less speculative and distributive, it loses its momentum.

As I am concluding this article, the Caijing magazine Website's lead article is titled: "No miracle, Only Conventionalities."

In an interview with Zhou Youguang, a 105-year-old scholar who was once an economist, the centenarian rejected the notion of the "China miracle," and said China must return to the path tested by other nations.