Twenty-one flight attendants were on 9 March awarded a total of one million yuan in compensation after their monthly pay was slashed from 10,000 yuan to just 800 yuan. A Beijing court found that Xinhua Airlines, a Beijing-based subsidiary of Hainan Airlines, had no legal grounds for cutting the cabin crew’s salaries in September 2008 and ordered it to make up the shortfall in wages

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.

A court in Chengdu has taken the highly unusual step of sanctioning a company for dismissing an employee without informing the trade union, as required by law, the Chengdu Commercial Daily (成都商报) reported on 9 October. The Jinjiang District People’s Court ordered a Chengdu electrical appliance company to pay the employee, a Ms Gao, 19,600 yuan in “double compensation” (双倍赔偿金) – that is twice the amount of economic compensation the employee would normally be entitled to if dismissed in accordance with the Labour Contract Law.

After eight years of petitions and lawsuits, an appeal court will finally hear the case of Wu Guangjun, one of 34 employees laid-off from Unit 804, a state-owned cotton and hemp warehouse in Beining, near Jinzhou in Liaoning province.

CLB condemns the sentencing of Wang Guilan to re-education through labour on the spurious and arbitrary charge of “disturbing social order” during the Olympic Games, and calls for her immediate release. Photo of the Birds Nest by DonDomingo@flicker.com

Workers seeking back pay from negligent employers have been attacked by thugs, detained by police and threatened not to talk to the foreign media. On 15 January 2008, Wang Chao a migrant worker from Sichuan had an arm chopped off by hired thugs from the construction company in Nanjing when he attempted to obtain the wages owed him. And on 30 January, more than 20 workers laid-off from a construction company in Sichuan were detained by police after they marched on the municipal government to demand their wages.
 

In 2004, several hundred taxi drivers in Dazhou city, Sichuan province, were ordered by the local government to re-purchase their taxi licenses, despite the fact that they had already bought them some years earlier on what they were officially told at the time would be a permanent basis. After attempting without success to negotiate with the local government, the taxi drivers then staged a series of mass public demonstrations in Dazhou city centre over a several-month period in 2004.
 

During the 1960s, a group of women workers from Tongchuan, Shanxi Province, were instructed by the government to move permanently from the city to the countryside to help open up remote tracts of rural wasteland. Only when they reached retirement age did they discover, according to local officials, that by doing so they had "forfeited" all right to receive their state retirement pensions. CLB has found a lawyer to represent nearly 500 of these women in a class-action lawsuit against the Tongchuan government, and we are now awaiting a date for the initial court hearing.

The Xianyang textile workers' strike was a major event in the recent history of China's labour movement for several reasons. The number of workers who took part in the strike – over 6,800 – is highly significant, as is the fact that most of these workers were women. And the length of the strike – almost seven weeks – makes it probably the longest recorded industrial action in China's post-1949 history.

Wang Guilan was a stall-holder in Enshi city's Wuyang Shopping Mall. When official plans were announced in the spring of 2001 for its demolition and conversion to other commercial uses, she signed a document agreeing to relinquish her stall for an agreed amount of compensation. When the terms of the agreement were not fulfilled, she decided to take the shopping mall management to court, paying a sum of 710 Yuan in court fees. However, the court failed to secure Wang's compensation, and intervention by the municipal government was suspected.