Around nine million students graduate each year from China’s vocational schools and colleges. They hope for a decent job with good prospects but all too often end up working on the factory production line. Even before they graduate, students are routinely exploited when deployed, for up to one year of their studies, as interns

Companies in the manufacturing heartland of Dongguan are abusing the labour supply (劳务派遣) system to such an extent that it is now the primary cause of labour disputes in the municipality, government officials have warned. They cited the case of an enterprise in Tangxia township which employed 40,000 workers, all of whom came from labour supply companies, which in theory are only supposed to provide short-term and supplementary labour.

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.

Powerful business interests in China and Hong Kong have effectively blocked recent labour reforms, raising the likelihood of further bouts of wildcat strikes and other unrest, a report said Wednesday. The China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based group that monitors labour conditions in China, said Hong Kong business leaders recently helped block proposed legislation in neighbouring Guangdong province that would have enabled workers to initiate and join in collective bargaining with management.

Three students go “undercover” as migrant workers in Dongguan. Their report details the pay and conditions and the attitude of migrant workers towards employer abuses and their awareness of the law.Photo by Travel Geographer.

Han Dongfang talks to a university graduate who accepted a job selling pharmaceutical products that promised a base salary of 1,000 yuan plus commission. However, he discovered, the reality for sales personnel after recruitment was very different.

Hotel employee, Zhu Peifang was summarily dismissed after 24 years of service, with no compensation, no year-end bonus and no wages for her work the previous month. With the help of CLB, Zhu was reinstated and paid six month’s wages in arrears.

New labour contract regulations promulgated by the provincial government of China’s coal heartland, Shanxi, contain specific provisions designed to enhance job security and workplace safety for coal miners. But while these provisions might look good on paper, they will in reality do little to protect those working in the world’s most dangerous coal mines.

Several thousand workers at the Hunan Coal Industry Group have entered the tenth day of a strike in a protest over the company’s proposed privatization and stock exchange listing plans.

A university student-worker at Coca-Cola’s bottling plant in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, was threatened and beaten by the managers of a labour supply company after he sought wages in arrears on behalf of himself and his colleagues, the Hong Kong-based pressure group Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) reported today.