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

China’s Supreme Court announced Thursday that the number of labour disputes handled by the country’s courts increased by a further 10.8 percent last year, after nearly doubling in 2008. In total, there were 317,000 labour dispute cases in 2009, Supreme People’s Court President, Wang Shengjun, stated in his work report to the National People’s Congress, compared with just 126,000 such cases in 2006.

Foreign investment in south China is expected to fall 4.9 percent this year, with firms facing the challenge of labour shortages and rising wages, according to a survey by the region's American business chamber.

Huada Electrical Appliances has piles of orders from abroad -- a welcome sign that China's exports are bouncing back after the global economic crisis. But the television and computer components company has just one-fifth of the 300 people it needs to work the assembly line to fill those orders by the end of June. "Our hair is turning grey because of the anxiety," a company executive, who would only give her surname Wu, told AFP, explaining that the firm was recruiting everywhere -- on pavements, near food markets and with job agencies.

In the old days Guangdong migrant workers like Liu Xiaorong would have been treated as factory fodder, given the bare minimum in wages and easily replaced if they complained. The tables have turned with an acute labour shortage in the so-called "factory of the world" meaning workers like Liu now call the shots. Even the lure of three times the normal pay and perks such as air conditioning, basketball courts and television is not enough to get workers to sign up.

Buoyed by a wave of new orders, Chinese companies are scrambling to recruit manual laborers, as pressure mounts on the country's lawmakers to boost the rights of China's millions of migrant workers.

If you ask a factory worker or a waitress in Dongguan if they have had a pay raise recently, they will either stare at you blankly or just burst out laughing. For all the hype in the Chinese and international media about 30 percent wage inflation and a “famine” of more than one million labourers in the Pearl River Delta, the reality for migrant workers remains the same; low pay, long hours and no job security.

Just a year after laying off millions of factory workers, China is facing an increasingly acute labor shortage. As American workers struggle with near double-digit unemployment, unskilled factory workers here in China’s industrial heartland are being offered signing bonuses. Factory wages have risen as much as 20 percent in recent months.

Two community teachers from Jianchang county in Liaoning, both fired by the local government in 2007, talk about their attempts to seek redress and the corrupt and underhand activities of local officials.