Momentum towards reform of China’s household registration (hukou) system seems to be growing in the build-up to this year’s National People’s Congress (NPC), the country’s annual parliament, which opens at the end of this week. Zhou Yongkang, China’s most senior official in charge of public and state security, wrote in the Communist Party’s theoretical journal Seeking Truth (求是) that there was now an “urgent” need to reform the country’s anachronistic policy of dividing citizens into urban and rural residents, and explore new ways of managing internal migration.

More than a month after 2,000 workers staged a violent demonstration at a Taiwanese electronics plant in Suzhou, China’s pre-eminent television station, CCTV1, investigated the background to the dispute and confirmed workers’ claims that 47 employees had been poisoned by the toxic chemical, hexane, used in the factory to clean touch screen panels for mobile phones.

China’s ministries of health, education and human resources on 10 February ordered local governments to implement new policies designed to eliminate discrimination against people with HBV, the virus that causes hepatitis B. They were given 30 days to ban the use of HBV blood tests in job recruitment and school entry examinations.

Following the lead of Jiangsu, which announced a 12 percent increase in the minimum wage this month, several other municipalities have indicated they too will raise the minimum wage this year. The cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Guangzhou and Dongguan have all separately indicated that the time is now right for an increase in the minimum wage, frozen by central government order on 17 November 2008.

Mentally handicapped people are being forced to work at brick factories in the central province of Hubei every day, morning to night, for just 208 yuan a year (less than the weekly minimum wage in Shenzhen), according to a news report broadcast this week on Shanghai-based Dragon TV. The local authorities in Hubei countered in a Wuhan Evening News report the same day (25 January) that they had already launched a campaign to “rectify illegal employment and crackdown on criminal behaviour."

China’s coal mine safety watchdog, the State Administration of Coal Mine Safety (SACMS), reported on 19 January that both the number of accidents and deaths in the country’s coal mines fell by around 20 percent last year. The number of deaths decreased from 3,215 in 2008 to 2,631 in 2009. And the number of accidents fell by 338 to 1,616, Xinhua quoted SACMS director Zhao Tiechui as saying.

China’s official media has responded to Friday’s violent demonstration at a Taiwan-funded enterprise in Suzhou with calls for local governments and trade unions to better protect workers’ rights, and establish effective channels for dialogue between labour and management.

The average salary for senior executives at China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) has risen to around 600,000 yuan a year, according to the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission. Executive salaries have nearly doubled over the last five years, and now stand at about 20 times the average SOE employee’s salary of 31,500 yuan a year.

The Guangzhou federation of trade unions is investigating why a trade union official at a Japanese owned company in the city recommended that a victim of sexual harassment be sacked. The 28 year-old office worker (Ms A) was dismissed in January this year after complaining about the blatant sexual harassment of her Japanese boss, which was caught on camera.

The number of workers filing grievances with the Beijing municipal authorities reached 80,000 by the end of November, nearly double the number last year, according to a local trade union official.