Two civil rights activists in Beijing have urged the municipal authorities to accept the children of migrant workers into city’s kindergartens so that they don’t have to pay high fees at private nurseries or risk sending their children to poorly supervised unlicensed kindergartens. At the same time, officials in Chaoyang district have already taken action to deliberately exclude rather than include migrant children.

In order to enhance worker solidarity worldwide - "Solidarity News" - the world's first on-line Internet radio broadcast about labour issues - was created.

The news today that the Shenzhen government has started paying out the wages owed by failed courier service DDS should not come as a surprise to anyone. Ever since DDS abruptly closed down last week, owing thousands of workers millions of yuan in unpaid wages, employees and company clients across the Pearl River Delta have been on the streets, staging demonstrations and demanding redress.

Two recent incidents have highlighted, once again, the dangers faced by migrant children in urban schools. On 17 January, a toddler died in a fire at an unlicensed kindergarten in Beijing, and yesterday Xinhua reported that the headmaster of a private school for the children of migrant workers in Nanning, Guangxi, had been arrested for beating a student and breaking his arm.

The China Daily and other prominent media outlets have focused on the recent case of journalist Li Junqi who received a 16-year jail sentencing for taking hush money when reporting on a coal mining disaster that killed 34 people in Hebei. Li’s lawyer said that his client did not take the bribes, and he plans to appeal. Li was one of ten journalists and over 48 Party and government officials were involved.

The similarities are chilling. In the multi-award winning movie Blind Shaft (盲井), two miners trick young migrants into working with them as their “relative” before killing them and extorting compensation from the mine boss. In a case reported by the domestic Chinese media on 26 December, a group of criminals murdered at least 17 young men in coal mines across the country before demanding compensation from their bosses.

As the year 2009 and this decade (the “aughts”?) comes to an end, various “best of” lists are floating around on the Internet, and the China Daily has compiled an interesting series of lists on its website. Besides being a year that saw many cultural and scholarly giants pass away, 2009 will probably also be remembered as a year in which workers and common netizens started to use proactive and exceptional means to defend their rights – a trend CLB noted in our report- the Workers' Movement in China (2007-2008). And 2009 will probably also be remember as a year in which various local governments had their credibility challenged like never before.

New announcements from the State Council and the Shanghai government seem to offer some measure of cheer for migrant workers in the New Year, however, as with all government pronouncements, the devil will be in the implementation of the detail.

A few days ago Dan Harris of the China Law Blog confirmed a trend that we at CLB and others have noticed recently, namely that the non-payment of overtime is becoming the biggest single cause of labour-related lawsuits and arbitration cases in China. The problem has become particularly severe as the economy picks up again and enterprises, many of whom sacked vast numbers of workers last year, pressure their remaining employees to work long hours in order to fulfill new contracts.

Pneumoconiosis, and other lung diseases, have long been one of the most deadly hazards affecting the Chinese workforce. However, in recent months the Chinese media has come to life and reported on a series of high-profile weiquan (rights defense) actions taken by pneumoconiosis sufferers in Shenzhen and elsewhere. These media reports have been succinctly summarized in an article at Global Voices by Don Weinland.