FESCO to help settle labor disputes

By Zhao Hongyi

FESCO, the Foreign Enterprises Service Company set up the People’s Disputes Settlement Panel of Foreign Enterprises, said over the weekend that it will provide legal services and help to settle increasing labor disputes and conflicts among its Beijing members.

The new agency will provide arbitration, persuasion and legal help to member enterprises and their employees whenever they have labor disputes. The outcome of these proceedings would be legally valid, according to Hao Jie, FESCO’s business supervisor.

“Due to different cultural backgrounds and legal systems, foreign investors used to misunderstand Chinese laws and regulations about protecting employees,” Xiao Linguang, chairman of the workers’ union of FESCO, said at the press conference, seeking to explain the rising number of disputes.

Founded in 1979, FESCO provides human resources, legal advice and consultancy to 200,000 foreign enterprises in Beijing. It has participated in solving labor disputes for three decades.

“We strongly suggest our members bring their disputes to us for settlement before going to arbitration and the courts,” Hao said. “It can greatly reduce the strain on the country’s social resources.”

There are as many as 82 million workers working in 5 million foreign-invested enterprises and companies in the country, according to the China Association of Enterprises with Foreign Investment (CAFEI), an agency under the Ministry of Commerce.

Pressure, workloads, low pay, conflicts, sexual harassment, layoffs and welfare have been at the center of many recent labor disputes.

In the notorious example of Foxconn, the world’s largest IT manufacturer from Taiwan, 12 young employees committed suicide at Foxconn’s Shenzhen dormitory.

Foxconn has three dorm compounds on the Chinese mainland. Each has 400,000 to 600,000 young employees. The reasons behind the deaths are complicated, and seem to be a combination of love, pressure, low pay and overwork.

Since the deaths, Foxconn withdrew from Shenzhen and opened a new 300,000-worker dorm in Zhenzhou, Henan Province, hoping to ease pressure and escape media attention.

The government supports the creation of dispute-settling panels inside each enterprise and industry. In 2006, a South Korean shoemaker in Dalian set up the first intra-company arbitration panel.

“The best move is to create a union in each company,” Tang Guoxiong, a lawyer at the Guangzhou-based Guorong Lawyer Office, said. “So then, the first step would be to allow unions.”