Two mass protests by workers in less than two months against privatization of State-owned firms point to the difficulties workers face in effectively protecting their rights and interests.

In last month's protest in the city of Tonghua, northeastern province of Jilin, the workers assaulted and killed an executive who was managing the acquisition of State-owned Tonghua Steel there by a private firm. In a similar protest last week in the city of Anyang, central China's Henan province, workers held as hostage a leader of the local State-owned assets supervision and administration commission until a deal was clinched with local provincial authorities.

That explains why the All China Federation of Trade Unions released a document by the weekend, stressing that schemes for privatization of State-owned enterprises should be regarded as ineffective if they are not adopted by a workers' congress.

In the aforementioned incidents, workers were excluded from the entire process of their State-owned firms being privatized. It seemed as if the firms are actually owned by their leaders and the higher authorities of the local State-owned assets supervision and administration commission. There was no transparency either about the negotiations with private firms, which were going to take over these enterprises.

Every citizen has a share in a State-owned firm in the broadest sense. That explains why they were once called public-owned enterprises. But when it comes to the shift of their ownership, they should be considered as being owned by all the workers as it is impossible, in a theoretical or empirical sense, to ascertain the opinion of people all over the country about the fate of a particular State-owned firm.

Every individual leader or a group of leaders of State-owned firms has no right to endorse negotiations on their own about the ownership shift of these enterprises. And, neither have the higher authorities from the local or central State-owned assets supervision and administration commissions. Instead, workers who are working in these enterprises and actually own them must be guaranteed their right to be informed of, to participate in and supervise the entire process of ownership change.

The fate of every individual worker is closely related to the State-owned enterprise he or she is working for. Workers will be well paid if the enterprises they work for are prosperous, and they will be ill paid or even lose their jobs if their firms run up losses or go bankrupt. They are the last people who will betray the interest of their own enterprises.

In contrast, leaders of State-owned enterprises are much less trustworthy on the question of privatization and are very likely to be bribed for their betrayal of the interest of their firms and their workers. This reality has been evidenced by the drain of State assets in the privatization of quite a number of State-owned enterprises.

Frankly, very few in their positions have the will power to resist the temptation of big sums of money offered in bribes. This is exactly where a workers' congress needs and should have substantial power as a naysayer to problematic privatization schemes. But it is a pity there was no voice of the congress of workers in the aforementioned mass incidents.

It is high time that the position of workers' congresses needed to be strengthened. This is also the best way to protect State-owned assets from being drained.

(China Daily August 19, 2009)