Pegatron, worried about higher worker costs and suffering sales, has announced it will be increasing automation at its plants. Taiwan-based design manufacturer Pegatron announced net losses of $29.8 million after its shipments of notebooks, netbooks and tablets dropped this year. It is expected that such shipments will decrease 10-15 percent in the fourth quarter, while motherboards and desktops will drop by 15-20 percent.

The announcement by electronics giant Foxconn on 30 July that it intends to automate much of its basic-level production by introducing one million robots over the next three years means an uncertain future for many of the company’s one million employees in mainland China.

Han Dongfang talks to Liu Xiangdong, who is fighting a lonely battle against the might of his former employer, a state-owned steel works in north-eastern China and the local government that is dependent on it for employment and taxes.

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

The Supreme People’s Court (SPC) announced on 13 July 2009 that labour disputes in China as a whole climbed by 30 percent in the first half of 2009. Certain areas saw sharper increases, with labour disputes in the first quarter of 2009 shooting up by 41.6 percent in Guangdong, 50.3 percent in Jiangsu, and a staggering 159.6 percent in Zhejiang.

Two major strikes over the last two weeks have shown that some local governments and managements have still not learnt important lessons from the privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) at the turn of the century. The protests at the state-owned Golden Emperor Group textile plant in Chongqing’s Fuling district on 13 and 14 April, and the former state-owned Yimian textile factory in Baoding, Hebei, in the first week of April erupted for precisely the same reasons as in the majority of SOE privatization disputes a decade ago: wages arrears, inadequate compensation for lay offs and the misappropriation of assets by management.

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.

In this Issue:

1. Editor's Note

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Editor's Note

In this Issue:

1. Editor's Note

2. Overview of Occupational Safety Laws

3. Firework industry

4. Coal Mines

(Broadcast on 13 April, 2002)