One of the few union activists ever to stand-up to Wal-Mart management has resigned from his position as union chair at Wal-Mart’s Nanchang Bayi store after being by-passed in collective contract negotiations.

Guo Haitao was know by China’s netizens as the “hero of Wal-Mart” for his determination to fight for the rights and interests of the 500 employees at the Nanchang store, including even a senior manager who had earlier openly criticized Guo for his union activities.

Guo resigned in frustration after store management refused to engage in genuine collective bargaining, and simply imposed the pro forma collective labour contract negotiated by the All China Federation of Trade Union’s (ACFTU) and senior Wal-Mart management.

The ACFTU launched a high-profile campaign in July to sign collective contracts at all Wal-Mart stores by the end of September, and establish unions in all the Fortune 500 companies represented in China. The campaign looks impressive with unions now established at Tesco, and IBM and at Volvo agreeing to unionize, but the process has largely been imposed on enterprises, apparently without any genuine worker involvement.

In Nanchang, store managers claimed that because Wal-Mart had already negotiated a general agreement with the ACFTU there was no need to negotiate a specific agreement with Guo as union chair. When Guo insisted on additional clauses to the agreement, management unilaterally convened a workers congress to approve the contract, which was then signed by a union representative from another store.

Wal-Mart’s action highlights the dangers of the ACFTU’s top-down approach to collective contract negotiations. Although the ACFTU claims that contracts should be negotiated by enterprise management and employees, by providing a pro forma or template agreement, it has given Wal-Mart the opportunity to effectively by-pass the enterprise union.

The failure of the ACFTU thus far to support one of the few enterprise chairs who was willing to engage in genuine collective bargaining with management calls into question the union’s commitment to China’s workers. CLB urges the ACFTU to learn from this incident and actively support workers’ representatives in their negotiations with management and not simply focus on fulfilling its collective contract quota, as appears to be the case today.

Guo Haitao’s resignation occurred on 9 September and was reported in detail by Southern Weekend (Nanfang Zhoumo 南方周末) on 17 September, and the article has now been translated into English by China Labor News Translations.