Xiaoran Liu will remember her 22nd birthday for a long time. She celebrated on the flank of Mont-Royal with seven other Chinese students who are all here to study for a month at the Université de Montréal School of Industrial Relations. “It was an unforgettable moment,” says Xiaoran with a beaming smile.
Xiaoran and her fellow students are all visiting Canada for the first time. She already has an undergraduate degree and is planning for a career in labour relations. She considers herself fortunate to have the opportunity to participate in the first summer program offered by the School of Industrial Relations, which is celebrating its 65th anniversary this year. “We studied industrial relations with excellent professors,” says Xiaoran. “And we met with government officials and business leaders during many group visits.”
The School of Industrial Relations set up its summer program for Chinese students following a cooperation agreement signed last year between the Université de Montréal and Renmin University in Beijing (see Forum, April 18, 2011). The two courses created for the program met with unexpected enthusiasm from the international network of industrial relations specialists to whom they were available. “As soon as the courses were announced, we received applications from everywhere, including Russia,” says Jean Charest, Director of the School of Industrial Relations.
“Health and safety at work: a human right,” was an obvious theme to address in a program studying the work conditions of employees in the Western world. In China, where helmets still aren’t the norm on construction sites, much remains to be done. “As is commonly known, China is undergoing an unprecedented economic boom, but in terms of laws protecting employees and labor relations they have a lot of catching up to do,” says Charest. “Chinese academics are connecting with their foreign colleagues to be informed and up-to-date. For us, it’s a unique opportunity to contribute to their modernization.”
Charest has given courses himself with his colleague Victor Haines on the training and development of the labour force.
The second course addressed modern problems in industrial relations and provided an overview of health and safety at work and of the international labour standards system established by the International Labour Organization. Recently hired Professor Jeffrey Hilgert presented the global political aspects of health and safety, including private regulation plans, precarious employment and the use of scientific proof.
Immersed in the Middle Kingdom
Prior to the arrival of the Chinese students, the Quebec students visited the Middle Kingdom. “It’s a country of excess,” says Marie-Gaëlle Lacasse who is currently finishing her Master’s thesis. In Beijing, she took three courses, including one to learn mandarin, which was challenging to say the least.
Undergraduate student Cynthia Denis was surprised to see that China was comparable on many levels to early 20th-century America, but “their labour laws are often dated or outright ignored,” she says. Culturally speaking, she was most impressed by the population density…and the size of doorways! “I stopped counting the number of times I hit my head entering a room,” said the tall and smiley young woman. The trip by Quebec students, which also included Nathalie Roussel-Boudreau, Matthieu Pelard, Tiantian Hu, Charles Narbonne Mérineau, Jeremy Gagnon, Émilie Bouchard, Christophe Fournier-Simard and Erika Dion, was a first and was organized very quickly. “We knew it was a new project and that all the details weren’t ironed out but everything went extremely well,” says Denis who prolonged her trip to Asia by four weeks.
This article was translated from a document originally published in French by Mathieu-Robert Sauvé
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