China Labour Net

In FY2012, wages of national government employees were reduced by 7.8% in order to relocate fund to programs for reconstruction from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disasters. The pay cut was extended to local government employees in FY2013 and salaries of teachers and other personnel working for public schools in Fukushima Prefecture were reduced by 4.44 to 7.77% in July 2013. "The workloads of teachers and other school personnel have increased since the disasters, and they have been striving in difficult situations. The government is indebted to them and ought to have increased allowances. Instead, the government reduced their salaries. It is totally unacceptable," said ABE Akihiko (photo), the secretary general of Koriyama Branch of Fukushima Teachers' Union in an interview conducted on December 12. 534 divisions of the union, including all the divisions of Koriyama Branch, adopted a resolution opposing to the pay cut. As a result, the government decided to discontinue it as of January 2014. (By YUMOTO Masanori)

HKCTU will organize a protest against the Korean Government to condemn their violation of the right to strike of Korean Railway Workers’ Union (KRWU) and to call for release of all the arrested strikers. The KRWU launched a general strike since December 9 against the move to privatize the state-run rail operator (Korea Railroad Corp). According to the statement of KRWU, their intention of the strike is to protect the public ownership of the Railway in Korea. However, their fight for justice was under violence attack by the Korean Government. On December 22, hundreds of riot police raided the KCTU's headquarters in Seoul injuring hundreds due to the use of pepper spray and violence. Since then, warrants for the arrest of 28 union officers have been issued based on criminal charges of ’obstruction of business’.

300 laid-off steelworkers from the Wugang Iron and Steel factory in Henan province protested last week over lack of compensation following their dismissal. The workers are reported to have marched to the city government offices for help recovering the compensation. However when government officials did not come out to speak with them, the workers blocked a road.  The authorities then sent more than two hundred police to forcibly disperse the workers, resulting in several workers being injured.

After three years of engagement at three Foxconn factories in China, the FLA has released its third and final verification assessment. Despite big promises to deliver labour rights improvements, the Fair Labor Association (FLA), tasked by Apple to remedy rights violations at its supplier Foxconn, has achieved little.

The Chinese working class plays a Janus-like role in the political imaginary of neoliberalism. On the one hand, it’s imagined as the competitive victor of capitalist globalization, the conquering juggernaut whose rise spells defeat for the working classes of the rich world. What hope is there for the struggles of workers in Detroit or Rennes when the Sichuanese migrant is happy to work for a fraction of the price?

http://offbeatchina.com/migrant-workers-in-beijing-dressed-in-cartoon-costumes-to-protest-unpaid-wages Here is another twist on Chinese migrant workers’ never-ending protest against unpaid…

One person was killed and 20 others injured after police in Cambodia clashed with protesting garment workers, according to rights groups.

The Philippine Airlines, Inc. (PAL) and the Philippine Airlines Employees’ Association (PALEA) have finally settled a dispute over an outsourcing program implemented in September 2011. 


Scotland breathed a collective sigh of relief at the eleventh-hour reprieve for the Grangemouth petrochemical plant, Scotland's biggest industrial site. 800 workers had faced unemployment 48 hours earlier, when its owner INEOS had announced its closure and liquidation. Another 550 oil refinery workers and 2,000 contract workers faced the same fate – with all the devastation, poverty and social destitution such shameless economic vandalism threatened.

Hong Kong faces severe lack of affordable housing. The middle-class cannot afford to buy; the grassroots must wait extensively in the increasingly long queue for public housing. Everyone is forced to pay exorbitant rent meanwhile. The problem lies in the government’s unequal distribution of land and housing resources in favor of the real estate lobby. It tries to manipulate the situation by divide and rule, pitting one distressed constituency in Hong Kong in need of housing against another and create unnecessary social divisions, like persuading urban population in need of housing to endorse the demolition of rural homes in order to build their own. The government claims the “shortage of land” to justify large-scale development projects and the real culprit is the real estate hegemony. But unfortunately, some people disregard this core problem behind the government's “blind rush to grab land,” take the government’s claim on face value, and attribute the problem to “too many new immigrants” coming in. They displace the blame onto new immigrants with One Way Permits through a malicious analogy: turning the “reduce waste at the source” slogan into their “reduce population at the source” slogan, implicitly comparing immigrants to waste matter. This imagined population problem is a way to divert attention from and downplay the problem of uneven distribution of land and housing resources. By so doing, they become de facto accomplices of the real estate hegemony and also reinforce the prejudice against new immigrants, aggravating social schism in Hong Kong.