China Labour Bulletin appears in the following article. Copyright remains with the original publisher.

A suicide in China has trained a spotlight on Apple and pressure-filled factories.
By David Pierson and Alex Pham

July 29, 2009

Reporting from Los Angeles and Beijing — Sun Danyong was the mild-mannered son of a potato-farming family in an impoverished corner of south-central China.

Han Dongfang talks to Dai Deshu, a 67-year-old former tailor from Chongqing about the long and painful struggle of thousands of elderly artisans and handicraft workers discarded during the process of economic reform.

The Supreme People’s Court (SPC) announced on 13 July 2009 that labour disputes in China as a whole climbed by 30 percent in the first half of 2009. Certain areas saw sharper increases, with labour disputes in the first quarter of 2009 shooting up by 41.6 percent in Guangdong, 50.3 percent in Jiangsu, and a staggering 159.6 percent in Zhejiang.

CLB's new research report on the workers' movement was published on July 9 2009.

The Wall Street Journal's China Journal and Reuters both gave the report prominent coverage, see below. While the trade union website Labour Start made the report one of its top stories for the week.

In China, What Workers Want
10 July 2009

The massive landslide at an iron ore mine in rural Chongqing on 5 June 2009, which may have killed more than 70 people, has once again highlighted the dangers China’s mines pose, not just to miners but to nearby communities and the environment as well.

In January 2009, a young man working in Shanghai returned to his home village in Anhui for the Spring Festival. He recorded his observations in a blog, which sheds light on the life facing the millions of rural migrants returning home after losing their jobs in the cities. Photo of rural Anhui by Toby Simkin

China Labour Bulletin appears in the following article. Copyright remains with the original publisher.

A retired coalminer with third-stage pneumoconiosis and living in poverty in rural Sichuan is being pressured by local officials to withdraw his work-related illness lawsuit against local coal baron, Liao Xing’an, one of the most powerful men in eastern Sichuan’s Qu county.

China  Labour  Bulletin  appears  in  this article. Copyright remains with the original publisher

Dec 11th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Over a four year period, more than 2,000 employees at an ailing state-owned enterprise had their pension contributions, totaling some 80 million yuan, secretly siphoned off by management, allegedly for speculative real estate developments in Shaanxi’s Mian county.