Organized labor is working hard to stop Congress from giving China normal trading rights permanently -- thus eliminating the requirement of the past 20 years that these benefits can be extended to China only one year at a time.

American scholars and the business community often dismiss labor's complaints about China as self-serving, thinly disguised protectionism. They scoff that the AFL-CIO cares only about minimizing job loss to Chinese workers and competition with Chinese products.

Why is it that politicians and intellectuals who once cheered on the AFL-CIO in pressing the cause of free labor in the Soviet Union and Poland won't give similar support when it comes to China?

In China, independent unions are not permitted. The only organization that may represent workers is the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, which is run by the Chinese Communist Party. Federation President Wei Jianxing is a member of the Politburo Standing Committee and helps run the party's security apparatus.

One of the contributing factors behind the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 was the leadership's fear that factory workers were beginning to join the demonstrations. A Chinese-style Solidarity movement is probably the Chinese regime's worst nightmare.

But China is changing, say China's defenders. It is in the midst of implementing economic reforms. True. And there's evidence to show that while these reforms may help the Chinese economy and foreign investors, they also make things even worse for Chinese workers.

A recent study by scholars at Australian National University compared the labor policies of China and Vietnam. Its conclusion was startling: ``The Vietnamese government has been more willing to grant trade unions some space to defend workers' interests, whereas the Chinese government has chosen to keep the unions under a tight rein.''

The process of economic reform means that enterprises must be profitable to survive. And when free unions are prohibited, one way of ensuring profits is by pushing labor to work for long hours at low pay.

That is what's happening in China. These economic ``re- forms'' mean that workers from the Chinese countryside are traveling to the southern and coastal areas to work 12 hours a day or more in factories that pay $30 a month or less.

We rarely get to know much about these migrant workers. The Chinese regime and the U.S. business community would much rather have Americans think of China as entrepreneurs chatting on cell phones. But one of the scholars who worked on the China-Vietnam study, Anita Chan, managed to get a glimpse of the lives these migrants lead.

``Illegally low wages and very long work hours were the norm in the factories that hired these migrant workers,'' Chan concluded.

Perhaps the Clinton administration can explain why China's refusal to allow independent unions is any more morally acceptable than was the repression of unions by the Soviet Union or communist Poland decades ago.