A compelling portrait of migrant worker life in the Pearl River Delta shows that while conditions have improved for some factory workers, for others, that change has come too late. Photograph by Renon-san.

More than a thousand workers at Sanyo Huaqiang Laser Electronics in Shenzhen’s Longhua district staged a one day strike last week over working conditions and a planned merger with a factory in another district in downtown Shenzhen.

Next month, amid the usual hoopla, Apple is expected to officially unveil its latest gadget: the much-awaited iPhone 4G. But halfway round the globe from the company's California headquarters, a young worker who has spent months in an eastern Chinese hospital wants consumers to look beyond the shiny exterior of such gadgets.

CLB's new research report on the workers' movement was published on July 9 2009.

The Wall Street Journal's China Journal and Reuters both gave the report prominent coverage, see below. While the trade union website Labour Start made the report one of its top stories for the week.

In China, What Workers Want
10 July 2009

Table of Contents

In January 2009, a young man working in Shanghai returned to his home village in Anhui for the Spring Festival. He recorded his observations in a blog, which sheds light on the life facing the millions of rural migrants returning home after losing their jobs in the cities. Photo of rural Anhui by Toby Simkin

China Labour Bulletin appears in the following article. Copyright remains with the original publisher.

2009-03-09
China's women have legal protection against workplace discrimination—at least in theory, they say.

AFP
HEFEI, China: Women check job listings as thousands gather at a job fair, Feb. 5, 2009.

China Labour Bulletin appears in the following article. Copyright remains with the original publisher.
By Tom Mitchell in Dongguan
Published: March 4 2009 18:39

More than 1,000 young job seekers, most of them women in their late teens, were put through their paces one morning last month at a temporary residential and training “base” in Dongguan, a manufacturing town in Guangdong province, southern China.

About 70 workers laid off from a prison in Heilongjiang in 2003 were cheated out of their social security, medical and unemployment benefits. They filed petitions and lawsuits in an attempt to reclaim their benefits but all to no avail. And when they approached a local government office they were attacked by a group of thugs.

China Labour Bulletin appears in the following article. Copyright remains with the original publisher.

By Tom Mitchell in Dongguan and Patti Waldmeir in Shanghai
Published: February 8 2009 16:57 | Last updated: February 8 2009 16:57