A two-day strike involving more than 1,000 workers at a Wuhan automotive components factory ended on Friday 24 August after management increased its pay offer to an extra 200 yuan a month.
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The number of collective worker protests recorded by China Labour Bulletin in July increased by more than 40 percent over the previous month. Of the 37 strikes and protests added to CLB’s strike map in July, just about half (18 in total) occurred in the manufacturing sector and seven (all wage arrears cases) were in the construction sector. Photograph of construction in Foshan by domi-san available at flickr.com under a reative commons license.
In the journal Collective Baragining Reasearch, Wang Jiangsong discusses what the democratic election of trade union officials in Shnezhen means for China and how best to capitalise on its success.
A low-key strike in the Chinese boom city of Shenzhen won a number of victories, including the right to have a worker representative elected into China's state-run labor unions. That set the stage for a historic, bottom-up workers' election
Nearly half the strikes and worker protests recorded by China Labour Bulletin in June ended up in some form of collective bargaining between management and workers, a sign that both labour and management are increasingly willing to use collective bargaining as a means of resolving labour disputes.Photograph: Strike at Guangzhou Citizen plant in June this year.
China Labour Bulletin Director Han Dongfang argues that democratic trade union elections in Shenzhen provide an opportunity for international trade unions to get involved and help build properly functioning trade unions in China that can engage in collective bargaining with management. Photograph by pmorgan available at flickr.com under a creative commons license.
Rather disconcertingly, several of the not-for-profits working in the region contacted by The Reg had not heard of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, which says on its web site it was founded in 1981 as the National Labor Committee.
Two strikes in four days by thousands of Guangzhou factory workers demanding higher pay have renewed the pressure on the provincial government to increase the minimum wage. The Guangdong government was expected to increase its statutory minimum wage earlier in the year but under pressure from the Hong Kong business lobby, the government announced that the minimum wage would only be increased later at “the appropriate time.” Photograph of strikers at the Citizen factory in Guangzhou from Weibo.
Last week, London bus drivers, members of Britain’s largest trade union, Unite, voted by more than 90 percent for strike action during the upcoming Olympic Games to press their claim for a £500 bonus. At the same time, more than 80 percent of the taxi drivers in the town of Yueqing, near Wenzhou, went out on strike on the first day of the national college examination (高考) in a bid to draw attention to the unfair competition they face from unlicensed cabs.
Local governments took a far more active role in dealing with strikes and worker protests in May, directly intervening in half the cases recorded on CLB’s strike map last month. Local governments intervened or mediated in nine of the 20 strikes recorded in May, compared with just one such intervention in April. Pay demands once again dominated workers’ complaints with nine cases last month, and the manufacturing sector was once again the major source of strikes, primarily in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and foreign invested factories.
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