A third strike at a Honda components plant broke out on Wednesday 9 June, with workers again demanding substantial pay increases and the right to elect a genuinely representative trade union at the plant, Honda Lock, in Zhongshan, which employs 1,700 workers.

Momentum towards reform of China’s household registration (hukou) system seems to be growing in the build-up to this year’s National People’s Congress (NPC), the country’s annual parliament, which opens at the end of this week. Zhou Yongkang, China’s most senior official in charge of public and state security, wrote in the Communist Party’s theoretical journal Seeking Truth (求是) that there was now an “urgent” need to reform the country’s anachronistic policy of dividing citizens into urban and rural residents, and explore new ways of managing internal migration.

A decision by the province that is China’s second-biggest exporter to raise minimum wage rates has heightened expectations that other provinces and cities will soon follow, just as the central government’s attention is shifting from economic stimulus to rising inflation. Eastern Jiangsu province, which exports more than Brazil and South Africa combined, raised its monthly minimum wage rate 13 per cent to Rmb960 ($140) last week. It was the first time the rate had been adjusted in two years.

Following the lead of Jiangsu, which announced a 12 percent increase in the minimum wage this month, several other municipalities have indicated they too will raise the minimum wage this year. The cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Guangzhou and Dongguan have all separately indicated that the time is now right for an increase in the minimum wage, frozen by central government order on 17 November 2008.

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

Sunday 24 May 2009

By: Claire Harvey

On a trip to China, Claire Harvey saw first-hand why it's so hard for Aussie clothing manufacturers to compete with cheap Chinese labour.

It is lunchtime at the Wen Ling garment factory and the clatter of sewing-machines gives way to laughing chatter, as young Chinese workers jostle and flirt their way to the tea-room.

Table of Contents

Part one: Those left behind

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Part one: Those left behind

Part two: Under the same blue sky? Rural migrant children in urban China

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

As China’s government struggles to reform its broken hukou system, millions of migrant children suffer the consequences of the anachronistic laws.
Release Date: 05/07/2009

The uneven economic development of rural and urban areas combined with a large pool of surplus labour has been the main driving force behind the world's largest internal migration of rural residents to the cities in China. Nearly half of its more than 130 million migrant workers are employed in the southern coastal province of Guangdong. And a major supplier of labour is the inland province of Henan, which exports more than 21 million migrants in all to other parts of China.