Contrasting different types of labor-management dialogue in China: a initiator-centered framework

Collective dialogue mechanism is characterized by diversification in China. The paper proposes an initiator-centered framework to generalize and elaborate on different types of collective dialogue mechanism. According to relevant actors in labor relations, there are five kinds, namely the government-promoted, the workplace trade union-initiated, the workers’ action-driven, the workers and workplace trade union-initiated, as well as the corporate-initiated. The paper analyses these five categories by fieldwork research, news and current literature, thereby figuring out to what extent these mechanisms pose challenges to the unitary determination and its sustainability of the management. Arguably, the number of collective contracts driven by the government-initiated mechanism is the largest, but the influence upon the power relationship between the employer and employees is the weakest. The type of collective dialogue driven by both workers and the trade union exerts greatest impact upon the power of enterprise management and the potential of sustainability.