American Chicken Feet, Chinese Tires, and the Struggle for Labor Rights

When Barack Obama took office, some of China's official "America Watchers" openly worried that the U.S. would start hammering China over the question of labor rights. This has been a longstanding issue between the two countries. For many years, American unions have been critical of China for not honoring two of the core International Labor Organization (ILO) labor rights conventions—freedom of association and the freedom to collectively bargain. Some American trade unions persistently wanted to threaten China with trade sanctions. A worry among Chinese officials and their advisors was that the incoming Obama administration, being closer to American labor than the Bush administration had been, would threaten to wield this big stick.¹

For the past few decades, American unions (and the trade unions of some other countries in the developed world) almost invariably linked labor rights with trade. This started during the Cold War when the U.S. was vehemently anti-Communist. American unions refused to have any relationship with the official Chinese government-organized All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) on the grounds that it was no more than an arm of the Communists. In a bipolar world of capitalism versus communism, Western nations linked human rights with trade—but since the communist countries had limited trade with Western nations, the Chinese did not deem this mindset a major problem.

It emerged as a more contentious issue after the post-socialist and still-socialist states integrated their economies with the so-called "free" world. In the U.S., the thick volumes of annual congressional Country Reports on Human Rights contain a section on labor rights. In the late 1990s, the world's nations were caught up in a debate over the inclusion of a social clause in the World Trade Organization's charter, which was a roundabout way of linking labor rights with trade.² At about the same time, a vehement debate was brewing in the U.S. over whether China should be granted permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) status, which is a U.S. trade instrument that puts conditions on human and labor rights. In 2004, the AFL-CIO played a leading role in arguing against giving PNTR to China. That same year, the AFL-CIO took an aggressive stance and filed a trade complaint—known as a section 301 petition—against China's appalling labor conditions (particularly within the country's export sector) on the grounds that they led to unfair trade competition.³ The case was rejected by the Bush administration. The AFL-CIO tried again in 2006, only to be rejected once more.

In the first year of the Obama administration, a showdown over trade sanctions appeared imminent. First came America's September 2009 imposition of a 35 percent tariff on Chinese auto tires. China quickly responded by announcing an anti-dumping investigation into America's poultry-parts exports to China (particularly affected would be chicken feet, a delicacy in China).⁴

It was widely reported that the tariff on tires, which sparked this tit-for-tat, was Obama's response to pressure from the United Steelworkers. The American action invoked what is known as a "safeguard provision" to help protect an American industry encountering the threat of a sudden surge of imports. The Chinese dumping investigation had to do with selling chicken feet to China below cost.⁵ But notably, the instruments used by both countries were protectionist in nature, without bringing up labor rights. Thus, although Obama's move to raise tariffs on Chinese tires was interpreted as, finally, a victory for the American unions—in that the tariffs have succeeded in blocking Chinese imports at a time of high unemployment—labor rights and trade have become de-coupled.

This turn of events can be traced back to 1994 when President Bill Clinton de-linked labor rights and trade considerations in the debate over giving China most favored nation (MFN) status.⁶ Since then, while still holding high the human rights and labor rights banner, all deployments using MFN or PNTR as tools by anti-China trade lobbies have been...