China Collective Negotiation in COVID-19: What We learn from a Comparative Analysis of China, the United States and Germany

An efficient collective bargaining system can solve labor conflicts through a consensus-based. Since the economic uncertainty caused by COVID-19, employers have been shut down or have had to reduce operations drastically. Many employers want to furlough or dismiss employees under certain circumstances in China. Meanwhile, many workers have lost income. Since workers returned to the work site in March 2020, labor unrest has spread to ask for wage arrears in the manufactory, construction, and service sectors in terms of strikes map from China Labor Bulletin. The paper targets three different countries with top economies and examines their bargaining models to keep industrial peace. The paper argues that China's bargaining model under state control strongly depends on government intention for intervention where there is labor unrest. The system focuses less on self-governance, which may result in a hard time maintaining industrial resources, even though the state issued the related policies to highly encourage companies to hold a negotiation before they lay off workers and reduce wages or work time to be employed. While fewer policies and China's traditional command-and-control regulation models could not provide an efficient approach to relieve labor unrest during the pandemic, Germany's bargaining model is more flexible to give an example for new governance and co-determination. Also, the bargaining model with sector-level reforms could do more for the United States private sector, the corporation, instead of adversarial. From a comparison of three collective bargaining models, the paper concludes the global perspectives' approaches to protecting workers’ rights.