An elderly community teacher talks to Han Dongfang about his attempts to get a just and decent pension for himself and his colleagues after the authorities basically abandoned them after decades of service. Photo Han Dongfang at Radio Free Asia

The Beijing authorities will on 1 January increase the city’s minimum wage for a second time in six months. The monthly minimum wage will go up by 200 yuan to 1,160 yuan, making it the highest in the country. In total, the Beijing Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Department announced six new measures, all of which will go into effect on 1 January, to strengthen its social welfare safety net as price rises begin to hurt the city’s most vulnerable.

Han Dongfang talks to Dai Deshu, a 67-year-old former tailor from Chongqing about the long and painful struggle of thousands of elderly artisans and handicraft workers discarded during the process of economic reform.

China Labour Bulletin was extensively quoted by major news organizations, including Time and The Guardian, on the riot at a steel plant in Jilin that led to the death of a senior manager.

Table of Contents

Part one: Those left behind

Part two: Under the same blue sky? Rural migrant children in urban China

The uneven economic development of rural and urban areas combined with a large pool of surplus labour has been the main driving force behind the world's largest internal migration of rural residents to the cities in China. Nearly half of its more than 130 million migrant workers are employed in the southern coastal province of Guangdong. And a major supplier of labour is the inland province of Henan, which exports more than 21 million migrants in all to other parts of China.

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.

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

March 12, 2009

In a clear sign that the authorities are willing to relax their enforcement of China’s labour laws during the economic crisis, the Guangdong provincial procuratorate has instructed its officers not to arrest or detain factory bosses and other senior staff suspected of white collar crime. However, workers whose protests are deemed to jeopardize factory production will be prosecuted. Photo of strike action by Sebi.

CLB presents a detailed examination of the current struggle for workers’ rights in China at an international conference to mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which opened in Paris on 4 December. Photo by Saad Akhtar.