Improving worker-employer relations an urgent political task

Vice President Xi Jinping Tuesday said that building harmonious relations between workers and their employers was an important and urgent political task. Xi, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, made the remarks while addressing a national meeting on the forming of harmonious labor relations held in Beijing from Monday to Tuesday. He urged local Party and government officials to further improve their understanding of the importance of efforts to build harmonious labor relations in the country. Currently and within a certain period in the future, the priority is to further improve laws and regulations concerning labor relations and ensure their sound implementation, to achieve a reasonable distribution of salaries, and to enhance corporate management in a democratic manner, Xi said. In addition, greater attention should be placed on solving labor disputes and the building of grassroots CPC units within enterprises, Xi added. "To promote harmonious labor relations entails efforts to always put the people first and to solve the most concerned, immediate and practical problems concerning workers' interests," Xi said. The vice president said workers' economic, political, cultural and social rights must be protected. Also at the meeting, Vice Premier Zhang Dejiang, said those glaring problems in the field of labor relations, including malpractices of impairing workers' legitimate rights and interests, must be solved. In some enterprises, especially in the labor-intensive sector, the salary levels of front-line workers have been overly low, while in some others, workers' needs for career development have been ignored, Zhang added, demanding strenuous efforts to reverse the situation. He urged speedy steps to forge harmonious labor relations by improving the employment contract system, the system of collective consultation between the employee representatives' group as one side and the employer the other side. The mechanism of incorporating a third-party in helping to coordinate the relations between workers and employers should also be upgraded quickly, Zhang said.