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.

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.

Liu Hanhuang, a 26 year-old migrant worker from Guizhou who dropped out of school after graduating primary school was on 2 November sentenced to death (suspended for two years) and ordered to pay more than 1.2 million yuan in compensation for murdering two managers, and severely injuring a third, at a Dongguan factory in June.

The authorities in China’s manufacturing heartland, Dongguan, are attempting to limit and control the activities of citizen agents (公民代理人), self-trained labour rights advocates who help workers who cannot afford professional legal services file labour dispute cases at arbitration hearings and courts.

At midday parents arrive at the Eastern Pearl School on an assortment of vehicles as they pick up their children, drop them off, or deliver hot lunches at the front gate. Most ride bicycles, pedal carts or motorcycles. A relatively wealthy few drive up in cars or vans. All, however, have one thing in common. They are migrant workers or entrepreneurs who have come to Dongguan, a manufacturing centre in China’s southern Guangdong province, in search of a better life.

A twenty four-year-old university graduate working at a moldings factory in the Houjie district of Dongguan jumped from his fourth floor dormitory after being refused time off work by management, the Guangzhou Daily reported.

Workers at a state-owned iron and steel plant in Jilin attacked and killed a senior manager during a protest at the proposed privatization of the factory on 24 July. Thousands of workers at the Tonghua Iron and Steel factory staged a demonstration on Friday morning after news spread that the Jianlong Group, China’s largest privately owned steel company, would buy a majority stake. Jianlong had taken a minority stake in Tonghua in 2005, laying off several thousand workers in the process, but only sought to increase its stake in Tonghua after the company turned a profit earlier this year.

China Labour Bulletin has written to major electronics companies, including Apple, Nokia and Motorola, urging them to investigate reports of excessive overtime, management abuse and the firing of striking workers at Wintek Dongguan Masstop, one of their major suppliers in China.

Ten years after the adoption of the International Labour Organization’s Convention on the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour on 12 May 1999, there is little evidence that the Chinese government, which ratified the convention in 2002, is making a determined effort to tackle the problem.

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Part one: Those left behind