The world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart, was cautioned by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions Wednesday not to retaliate against some of their local employees who've set up four trade unions over the past 10 days.

The federation, led by the Communist Party of China (CPC) and backed by the government, will take measures to protect the workers if they are targeted by Wal-Mart, said Guo Wencai, director of the federation's grass-roots building department. It wasn't permitted to replace trade unions with other organizations, the official said.

Wal-Mart should not question the legality of trade unions, Guo said, as under Chinese law it was compulsory that any company or institution with a staff of 25 or more must set up its own trade union.

According to some local media a Wal-Mart spokesman had questioned if these trade unions were legal. He said the company had not been officially informed by the federation about the matter.

The federation had never given prior notice on the establishment of any of the existing 1.17 million grass-roots trade unions across the country, Guo said.

The official confirmed that since the first Chinese Wal-Mart trade union was set up in Jinjiang City, Fujian Province, on July 29, four more Wal-Mart trade unions had been established by local employees, three in Shenzhen City, Guangdong Province and one in Nanjing, the provincial capital of Jiangsu Province.

It was unlikely that the setting-up of trade unions would have a negative impact on the Wal-Mart stores, and instead, they may benefit from it, he said.

Currently, all the stores in China are operating normally, and hopefully, Wal-Mart trade unions would be established and operated like all others in the country which are set up in a relaxed and harmonious manner, according to the official. According to previous reports the number of trade union members topped 150 million last year.

Guo disclosed that in the first six months of this year almost 9 million Chinese had joined trade unions while over 80,000 trade unions had been newly set up in the country. Meanwhile, the country had witnessed large-scaled growth of trade unions in foreign-funded companies, he added.

(Xinhua News Agency August 10, 2006)