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Review: Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China, by Eli Friedman. Cornell University Press/ILR Press, 2014 .
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When Honda workers in China went on strike for higher wages, their union sent thugs to convince them to return to work. Eli Friedman’s new book Insurgency (…)
As basic services get privatized, there’s a rising tide of sanitation worker strikes in the Pearl River Delta. But this one was unusual: the striking workers are mostly former villagers, displaced from their homes here a decade ago when the university “Mega Center” took over the island.
For (…)
An in-depth look at a strike by sanitation workers in Guangzhou and the new terrain of class struggle developing in China.
For nearly a month, garbage piled up throughout the streets of Guangzhou’s edifice to higher education as China saw another cleaner strike. The disgruntled employees are (…)
Worker militancy has shown cracks in both China’s economic plan and the Communist Party’s official trade unions.
The following is an excerpt, published online by Jacobin, from Eli Friedman’s Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China , available now.
For years, a strong alliance (…)
After the swirl of poison dust settled, the factory grounds resembled a battlefield, strewn with charred bodies and rubble. The explosion, which left about seventy-five workers dead and 185 injured, wasn’t the scene of an attack, really—just another one of the countless industrial accidents that (…)
An explosion killed at least 68 people and injured more than 120 at a factory in China that makes wheels for U.S. carmakers, including General Motors, state media said, as the country suffered its worst industrial accident in a year.
Chinese media cited the government as saying that the blast (…)
This letter was sent to Guardian but the latter had not published it.
On June 26, 2011, our friend Han Dongfang released a striking commentary in the Guardian arguing that the International Trade Union Confederation should “discuss affiliation with the ACFTU.” [See below] He called on the (…)
Xiaming Li, Education in China: Cultural Influences, Global Perspectives and Social Challenges (Nova, 2013), £124, and Holly H Ming, The Education of Migrant Children and China’s Future (Routledge, 2013), £85.
Chinese education has become a hot topic in the UK. Education and childcare (…)
Chinese prosecutors have dropped charges against a labour activist in southern Guangdong province, in a case widely seen as a litmus test of official tolerance for the country’s increasingly robust worker movement.
Wu Guijun, 41, went on trial in Shenzhen this year for allegedly leading a (…)
1200 Shenzhen Workers Call for the Full Implementation of Social Security Fund
1200 workers from 101 factories signed an appeal calling for the full implementation of the social security fund. The appeal points out that what had happened to the Dongguan Yue Yuen workers’pension fund last (…)
Self-presentation of China Labour Net website taken May 3rd, 2014.
Background
Globalisation has enabled big corporations to spread their production around the world, dividing and ruling workers in those countries. The recent global credit crunch has clearly demonstrated that the historical (…)
Green Left Weekly’s Peter Boyle spoke to Kevin Lin, who is doing research for his PhD at the University of Technology Sydney on the labour movement in China, about the background to a new wave of strikes in the country.
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Peter Boyle – There seems to be a new labour (…)
This morning, workers from the Laosan plant (plant no. 3), who were the last batch of workers to hold the line, finally resumed work after the combined and heavy pressure from the government and the management. The ten days wei-quan (defend one’s rights) action by Yue Yuen workers has drawn to a (…)
Many strikers at the Yue Yuen shoe factory complex in Dongguan to have returned to work after the company made several concessions and the local authorities increased pressure on the workers to accept the deal on the table.
However, several thousand workers are continuing with the strike, the (…)
Headlines of article concerning the Yue Yuen strike can a bit misleading. It will be closer to the truth to say “biggest strike in China in the last ten years”. In 2002 the Daqing oilfield workers’ big action against privatization involved hundreds of thousands of workers, some said it was (…)
April 23, 2014 — Labor Notes — The strike at the Yue Yuen shoe factory in Dongguan, China, keeps growing. Now 48,000 workers have joined and local groups are calling for international solidarity.
Labour activists at the site, in touch directly with the workers, are asking supporters to target (…)
The largest strike in China’s history has entered the sixth day, defying state attempts to repress workers struggling against economic and social injustice. Police arrested several organizers of the strikers at the Yue Yuen factory, which produces shoes for Nike and Adidas.
As the situation (…)
On April 5, 2014, several thousand workers, out of 60,000 from Yue Yuen Dongguan, the world’s largest maker of athletic shoes, took to the streets and gathered at the highway to protest against the violations of Yue Yuen Industrial Holdings Ltd. Yue Yuen, is a Taiwanese giant shoe manufacturer (…)
Editorial Note: In early March, 2014, workers at Walmart Changde began to fight for compensation when the management decided to close the shop . The workplace union there picketed the shop before they were forcefully removed. After this some workers at another Walmart branch wrote an appeal (…)
Police moved in on Friday 21 March to remove the 143 workers had been picketing a Walmart store in the central Chinese city of Changde for two weeks , after management announced 4 March that the store would close down on. Several workers were injured. See photos below..
Violence also erupted (…)
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