Three students go “undercover” as migrant workers in Dongguan. Their report details the pay and conditions and the attitude of migrant workers towards employer abuses and their awareness of the law.Photo by Travel Geographer.

Han Dongfang talks to a university graduate who accepted a job selling pharmaceutical products that promised a base salary of 1,000 yuan plus commission. However, he discovered, the reality for sales personnel after recruitment was very different.

Hotel employee, Zhu Peifang was summarily dismissed after 24 years of service, with no compensation, no year-end bonus and no wages for her work the previous month. With the help of CLB, Zhu was reinstated and paid six month’s wages in arrears.

New labour contract regulations promulgated by the provincial government of China’s coal heartland, Shanxi, contain specific provisions designed to enhance job security and workplace safety for coal miners. But while these provisions might look good on paper, they will in reality do little to protect those working in the world’s most dangerous coal mines.

Several thousand workers at the Hunan Coal Industry Group have entered the tenth day of a strike in a protest over the company’s proposed privatization and stock exchange listing plans.

A university student-worker at Coca-Cola’s bottling plant in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, was threatened and beaten by the managers of a labour supply company after he sought wages in arrears on behalf of himself and his colleagues, the Hong Kong-based pressure group Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) reported today.

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

CLB looks at how the workers’ movement in China has developed over the last two years, how the government has responded to it, and why the official trade union has been unable to play a positive role in it. Photo by Saad Akhtar

Han Dongfang talks to a workers’ representative trying to reclaim 24,500 yuan in wage arrears for his colleagues about the refusal of the boss to pay and the reluctance of the local labour bureau to get involved in this “small matter.”