The final death toll at Rana Plaza was 1,127.  It was by far the worst disaster in the centuries-long history of garment industry tragedies. Yet, the response of the international garment industry and the government in Bangladesh thus far has been to promise basic safety standards and workers’ rights that should have been in place years ago.

As several hundred migrants from Anhui staged a protest in Beijing on 8 May demanding a proper investigation into the suspicious death of a young migrant at a local market, police descended in force and helicopters circled above to make sure the protest did not get out of hand. Front page photograph of a now demolished migrant community in Beijing.

Sunday 28 April is the International Labour Organization World Day for Safety and Health at Work, the day workers around the world commemorate the victims of work accidents and occupational disease and urge all governments to take action.

Ten years ago, a young migrant worker, Sun Zhigang, was brutally beaten to death whilst in police custody in Guangzhou. When the incident was reported by the Southern Metropolitan Daily at the end of April 2003, it caused a national outrage and mounting public pressure forced the newly installed government in Beijing to quickly dismantle regulations controlling the movement of migrant workers in an attempt to prevent a similar tragedy in the future.

The Hong Kong dock strike is making people in the shipping industry here nervous. The headline in today’s South China Morning Post proclaimed “Strike a threat to port’s status, industry says.” Photograph of strikers inside the terminal on 1 April.

The right to strike came up again during the annual parliamentary gathering in Beijing last week. Ge Jianxiong, head of Fudan University Library, suggested that the right to strike be restored to the Chinese constitution, telling the Financial Times that strikes were an effective way of defending workers’ rights, and should be legally protected.

The number of migrant worker deputies attending the National People’s Congress (NPC) in Beijing has increased tenfold from just three last year to 31 deputies this year. However, that still represents little more than one percent of the total number of NPC deputies or about one deputy for every eight million migrant workers. Photograph of the Great Hall of the People by Amanda and Andy availabe at flickr.com under a creative commons license.

There are an awful lot of obnoxious and abusive bosses in China. Encouragingly, however, more and more employees are refusing to take it anymore and are blowing the whistle on their boss’ excesses.

Strikes by bus drivers are a regular occurrence in China, with drivers in one city or another suspending services in protests at pay and working conditions just about every week: Not so in Singapore where there has not been a strike of any description since the 1960s. Not until last week, that is, when nearly 200 Chinese bus drivers went out on strike over unequal pay.Photograph of Serangoon Gardens dormitory courtesy of Stephanie Chok.

A collective protest by workers at an auto parts factory in Guangdong at being forced to work an additional 20 minutes each day to make up for their rest period, brought almost immediate success after a year of polite but fruitless negotiations.