China’s official media has responded to Friday’s violent demonstration at a Taiwan-funded enterprise in Suzhou with calls for local governments and trade unions to better protect workers’ rights, and establish effective channels for dialogue between labour and management.

Nearly a quarter of the workforce at a state-owned tobacco plant in Henan have had their wages slashed and their employment contracts “spun off” to an employment agency as part of the enterprise’s restructuring program.

During the last decade China has been hit by a wave of wildcat workers strikes, the fundamental cause of which, according to Han Dongfang, is the lack of Chinese workers to engage in collective bargaining with their employers.

The authorities in China’s manufacturing heartland, Dongguan, are attempting to limit and control the activities of citizen agents (公民代理人), self-trained labour rights advocates who help workers who cannot afford professional legal services file labour dispute cases at arbitration hearings and courts.

A court in Chengdu has taken the highly unusual step of sanctioning a company for dismissing an employee without informing the trade union, as required by law, the Chengdu Commercial Daily (成都商报) reported on 9 October. The Jinjiang District People’s Court ordered a Chengdu electrical appliance company to pay the employee, a Ms Gao, 19,600 yuan in “double compensation” (双倍赔偿金) – that is twice the amount of economic compensation the employee would normally be entitled to if dismissed in accordance with the Labour Contract Law.

On 27 July, the municipal government of Xian formally banned a local workers’ rights group that was seeking, but never obtained, official recognition of its status as an enterprise restructuring watchdog.

Up to 500 employees at hi-tech giant Intel’s factory in Chengdu, Sichuan staged a one day strike last month in a protest over wage discrepancies with employees recently transferred in from the multi-national’s Shanghai facility, according to a report in China Business Journal. The workers claimed that the employees from Shanghai were being paid up to four times more for the same production line positions.

The government’s revisions to its Work-related Injury Insurance Regulations will go a long way to giving workers the insurance cover and legal protection they need, but lack the clout to force employers to comply.

The death of Chen Guojun at the hands of angry workers at the Tonghua Steel works on 24 July prompted a flurry of comment and speculation in the Chinese media. There was one issue however that everyone seemed to agree on; namely the need to better protect the rights and interests of workers during the process of state-owned enterprise reform - the only question that remained was how.

In July 2009, Zhang Haichao voluntarily underwent an operation to open up his chest in order to prove he was suffering from the fatal lung disease pneumoconiosis. Photograph of Zhang by Yanzhou Metropolis Daily