A migrant worker at a textile factory in Zhejiang has been ordered by family planning officials to travel the 1,600 kilometres back home in order to prove that she is not pregnant, the China Daily reported today.

A Xinhua news article reports that students at Shenyang University can now choose major in “petitioning”. In a meeting with Shenyang Party Secretary Zeng Wei, the Shenyang Petitioning Bureau Chief Chen Guoqiang stated that the educational level of the petitioning bureau was low and that they were understaffed. Zeng then brought up the idea of setting up a petitioning major to help solve the problem. After doing a study on its feasibility, Shenyang University decided that it would be able to provide the major (under the law department), and that the university was indeed well positioned to take on such a task - since it could offer courses in law, economics, sociology and other related fields. The university also stated that it was committed to providing the type of talent and expertise necessary to meet society’s current needs.

China Labor News Translations has acquired and translated into English a copy of the much publicized collective labour agreement negotiated by Walmart and the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) last year. Apart from the fact that the contract exists at all, there is little in the document for Walmart employees in China to celebrate. There are no provisions for the resolution of individual and collective disputes and the basic terms of the agreement related to work hours, vacation time, welfare insurance, workplace health and safety are locked in for five years.

In February, the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General on the issue of human rights and transnational businesses and other enterprises, John Ruggie, held a regional consultation session in Delhi, India that I took part in. Many civil society groups and NGO’s from all over Asia were able to voice their opinions and share their grassroots perspectives and experiences about business and human rights, and afterwards, members from various civil society groups from Asia sent professor Ruggie a submission about how to further improve the framework, and professor Ruggie promptly responded. (Both the submission and the response can be found at the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre).

As China gets ready to celebrate Labour Day on 1 May, news has come out that a democratically elected trade unionist - Liu Yongyi (刘泳仪) - has been fired for pro-worker activism. Ironically, Liu didn’t work at a foreign enterprise or a sweatshop, but rather, at the Guangdong Union Hotel - a hotel run by the Guangdong Province Federation of Trade Unions Industries Company (广东省总工会实业公司).

Several little boys were lining up in front of a tap in the corner of a school playground in suburban Beijing waiting to clean their lunch boxes. In the nearby classroom, another boy, about six or seven years old, was putting away his clean lunch box carefully into a plastic bag and then into his school bag. I was touched by these scenes. Some people say China is like Hong Kong 30 years ago. I am not sure this is true but these scenes did remind me of growing up in Hong Kong in the 1970s when parents were working hard to make a living, and children had to take care of themselves, and help out in the family. It was common at that time for older sisters to drop out of school to work to support the family. The difference was that Hong Kong children did not face systematic discrimination because of their residence status.

A recent Xinhua report shows the tricks that a company in Dongguan, Guangdong Province will use to fool labour department investigators. The company will choose experienced and intelligent employees and make them memorize a list of 32 answers to common labour department inspection questions. New employees, elderly employees and employees with bad memories will get the day off. Certainly, similar devious techniques are used on other Corporate and Social Responsibility audits.

Beijing University has once again fallen into controversy, this time, over allegations that it has discriminated against Hepatitis-B carriers, short people, and obese people. RFA reports that in an open letter to the president of the university, a Beida student -Lei Chuang (雷闯) has pointed out that a person from the office the Health Sciences Centre has openly stated that the centre will not enroll Hepatitis-B carriers, and that male students must be over 1.6 meters tall, females over 1.5 meters tall, and prospective students’ body weight must not be 20% over the average. (One wonders what the vertically-challenged but brilliant Deng Xiaoping and the corpulent Mao Zedong might have thought of such a discriminatory policy).

Joel Martinsen from Danwei has translated two articles that shed new light on the problems in the petitioning system. The first, written by a frustrated official working in a small town petitioning bureau, shows the obscene amount of time and money that local petitioning officials spend in keeping tracking of petitioners locally and in “retrieving” petitioners who travel to higher level petitioning offices to reflect their problems. The petitioning officials suppress these petitioners rather than solving their problems because, under the current “zero tolerance policy” system, a blemish on their record could permanently tarnish their careers. The second article, written by highly respected CASS researcher Yu Jianrong, shifts the focus back towards seeing things from the petitioners’ point of view, and shows how the “zero tolerance policy” is not conducive towards solving the petitioners’ issues and providing justice, nor towards enhancing judicial authority.

In recent press interviews about the global economic crisis and its impact on social stability in China, I’ve said that the majority of migrant workers who suffered pay cuts or even lost their jobs were not angry at the boss but rather accepted that their loss was the result of global economic forces beyond their control. I added that this could all change however if bosses started to use the economic crisis as a pretext to lay-off workers without due compensation or cheat them out of their wages. Now, according to one blogger, Pang Zhujun, this appears to be happening.