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.

One of Shenzhen’s largest manufacturers has threatened not to hire any new workers in the city after a court ordered it to pay 800,000 yuan in compensation for nonpayment of statutory overtime and social insurance contributions for more than one hundred workers.

In a surprising but welcome move, Time Magazine has included “the Chinese worker” in its final list of nominees for Person of the Year 2009. Hopefully, the nomination will spur the international community to look more closely, not only at the contribution China’s workers have made but also at the problems they face on a day to day basis.

For the family members of the recent Hegang coal mining accident that took the lives of 108 people in a gas explosion, one of the most tragic facts that will most likely haunt them forever is why so many workers ended up dying when dangerous levels of gas were identified nearly 43 minutes before the first explosion took place? Did the miners die in vain? What factors contributed to such a senseless tragedy that should have and could have been avoided? The influential newspaper Southern Weekend (南方周末), in an investigative research piece, has determined that the vast majority of workers at the Xinxing mine did not receive any warning about the exceedingly dangerous levels of gas despite that fact that the ground level headquarters received reports, and the mine management did not install a sufficient amount of emergency-use telephones that could have informed workers about the dangerous levels of gas.