The panelists, who also include Leslie Chang, the author of Factory Girls [3], will examine the impact of the financial crisis on China’s workers, and how they are shaping economic, legal and political reform in the country.

As CLB shows in its latest report on the workers’ movement in China [4] (soon to be published in English), China’s workers have a long list of grievances and they are more and more willing to take collective action to address those grievances. Because enterprise trade unions are largely unwilling to stand up for workers’ rights and there is no effective means within the enterprise for dispute resolution, workers have taken matters into their own hands and staged strikes, protests and demonstrations in a bid to force the local government to intercede on their behalf. And this confrontational approach has often been successful in getting workers their desired results, such as payment of wages in arrears or higher wages, better working conditions or severance packages, or forcing management to curtail planned changes to work practices, etc.

The CECC was created by Congress in October 2000 with the legislative mandate to monitor human rights and the development of the rule of law in China, and to submit an annual report to the President and the Congress. The Commission consists of nine Senators, nine Members of the House of Representatives, and five senior Administration officials appointed by the President. The transcript of Friday’s roundtable will, in due course, be available in the CECC website.