China Picks Labour Day To Warn Workers On Jobs

China chose Labour Day on Thursday to warn its workers that economic reform could cost their jobs but comforted them with reassurances that they remained the masters of the state.

With reform becoming an irreversible trend in socialist China, the working class, as the masters of the country, are leading the trend as the main force in, as well as a strong driving force for, reform, said a front-page editorial in the People's Daily.

Labour Day is one of the few national holidays in China, whose constitution enshrines the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The editorial, titled Deepening of reform and the working class, contained a message to China's urban workers that the delicate reform of lumbering, loss-making state industries would push ahead this year based on a soft landing for the economy in 1996.

Reform of state-owned enterprises is a major strategic task in the reform of the economic system, and there can be no turning back, it said.

The difficulties in the reform process can only be overcome by deepening the reform, it said.

The editorial referred to what it called the deep-rooted problems of state enterprises, of which an estimated 70 per cent are in the red or operating at a loss and unable to shed workers because of a decades-old policy of cradle-to-grave welfare.

It is high time to address these problems, it said.

However, it warned that workers could suffer during the deepening of reform of state enterprises.

Some employees' interests might be affected temporarily in the reform due to adjustment of the economic structure and new distribution of interests, it said.

It urged workers to adopt a correct understanding of the temporary difficulties in light of the long-term benefits of the changes.

Beijing has for years tiptoed around the issue of reform of state enterprises, fearing that mass lay-offs from inefficient state firms could spark social unrest