The stands below are the Association’s founding positions, drawn from the 1998 programme of the Free China Movement – the coalition the IACW belongs to – and carried forward as a living document. The Movement’s full present-day policy analysis is the paper Labor, Wages & Social Protection in Mainland China.
Free and independent trade unions
Workers have the right to form and join unions of their own choosing, independent of employers and of any political party or state body. The 1998 Action Goals commit the coalition to help support the development of a free trade-union movement in China.
The right to organise and to strike
Organising, collective bargaining and strike action are rights, not concessions. No worker should face detention, dismissal or blacklisting for exercising them.
Wages paid in full and on time
Wage arrears – above all to migrant workers – are a standing injustice. Wages owed are a debt, enforceable like any other.
Social protection for every worker
Pensions, medical care, unemployment and injury insurance must cover migrant and informal workers on equal terms, and benefits earned in one place must be portable to another.
Laid-off and retired workers
Workers who built the state sector must not be discarded by its restructuring: the grievances of laid-off and retired workers – unpaid pensions, lost benefits, corrupt asset sales – deserve peaceful, lawful resolution, as the Movement’s June 1998 statements insisted.
Workplace safety
No production target outranks a worker’s life. Independent investigation and honest reporting of industrial disasters are preconditions of safety.
Gig and platform workers
Delivery riders, drivers and other platform workers are workers, with the same rights to organise, to insurance and to a fair share of the value they create.
Standing document of the International Association of Chinese Workers. First published in this form 2026-10-24, from the founding programme of 1998; revised as the Chronicle grows.