The provincial federation of trade unions in southwest China's Yunnan Province has recently trained about 400 city- and county-level union officials on how to negotiate wage increases with enterprises in a period of rising consumer prices.

The weeklong training, which ended on Monday and included courses such as negotiation tactics and skills, was designed to promote collective contract signing and to extend the negotiation mechanism to all enterprises in the province, Lu Zhengguo, vice-chairman of Yunnan Federation of Trade Unions, told China Daily on Monday.

The training is important for teaching province-wide trade union leaders how to help employees to ask for higher pay when goods prices are rising rapidly, Lu said.

"Residents have been affected by rising consumer prices. The recent price rises in some places in Yunnan were even bigger than the national average," he said.

With those enterprises that have not set up trade unions, local union federations should intervene to promote wage negotiations, and employers should be held legally responsible if they refuse to implement collective negotiation, Lu said.

China's trade union law stipulates that trade unions can sign collective contracts and conduct wage negotiations with employers on behalf of employees.

Some provinces in the country such as Anhui, Fujian and Hubei have regulations on wages, which state that employers will be fined or held legally responsible if they refuse to negotiate with trade unions without a proper reason.

Yu Yi, deputy head of the trade union at Yunnan Coal Chemical Industry Group, participated in the training and said the union was considering holding talks with the company's management to negotiate on possible wage increases to deal with the surging CPI.

Yunnan plans to make the mechanism of collective negotiation on wages cover 40 percent of the enterprises in the province and will raise the proportion to 60 percent by 2011 and 80 percent by 2012, according to a report in Legal Daily on Monday.

Lu Xuejing, a labor expert at the Beijing-based Capital University of Economics and Business, said a period of rising consumer prices provided a good opportunity to seek wage rises, but adverse effects might be caused if they were made compulsory.

"Many provinces have just raised the minimum wage standard this year, and another wage rise will surely increase enterprises' labor costs," Lu said.

She said as Yunnan's industrialization level is not very high, another round of wage hikes might add to the pressure on manufacturers and "it might not be good for employment".

Yunnan has raised the minimum wage standard by an average of 22 percent since July this year.

(China Daily November 23, 2010)