As collective bargaining begins to gain traction in China, the need to support workers who are willing to stand up and represent their colleagues is increasingly apparent. By Photografiti.
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The head of the Communist Party in Hunan has told reporters from Hong Kong that an investigation into the suspicious death of veteran labour activist Li Wangyang in early June had concluded that Li took his own life, the South China Morning Post reported today.
Zhou Qiang claimed that Li’s family accepted the verdict but this has not been confirmed because his family and their supporters have been threatened by the authorities, kept under house arrest or disappeared soon after their campaign for justice was launched.
The suspicious death of Chinese labour activist Li Wangyang on 6 June has triggered a wave of anger and massive demonstrations here in Hong Kong, putting pressure on the Chinese government for a special investigation into his death and the torture he suffered during his 21 years’ in prison.
We call on the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress to establish a special committee to uncover the truth surrounding Li Wangyang’s death, how he was rendered both deaf and blind, and the extent of the torture he endured over two decades in prison. Photo by jblahblahblah available at flickr.com under at creative commons licence.
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.
Li Wangyang, a veteran labour activist who was only released from a ten year prison term last year, was found dead, hanging from a window in his hospital room, on 6 June; his family told the media yesterday.
Well-known democracy campaigner and workers’ rights activist Hu Mingjun is to be released from prison on 28 May after serving an 11 year prison term for “subversion of state power,” Human Rights in China reported today. He is believed to be in very poor health.
Two workers were held in police detention for 26 days for allegedly imprisoning their factory manager in a dispute over unpaid pension contributions. They were eventually released on 29 April but the police have refused to say if the workers will be charged or not.
More than 5,000 workers at the Hanzhong Steel Company in the northern province of Shaanxi went out on strike 14 February demanding higher pay. Workers complained that they had to work weekends and holidays and yet their average monthly wage was still just between 1,000 yuan and 1,500 yuan, barely enough to live on.
The former Party boss of Shizong county in the south western province of Yunnan is being investigated for alleged corruption following the death of 43 miners in a massive gas explosion on 10 November 2011, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
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