CHINA-ECONOMY: LABOUR UNREST

 Reports indicate that with increasing layoffs of workers, unrest in factories and on construction sites is growing. Worker protests and demonstrations doubled last year, to 2,774, with December’s total of more than 400 such incidents, setting a monthly record. Geoffrey Crothall, Communications Director at the Hong Kong-based workers’ advocacy organization China Labour Bulletin, said “The increase in strikes and protests began last August around the time of the yuan devaluation and subsequent stock market crash and continued to build during the final quarter of the year, as the economy has showed little sign of improvement.” Layoffs have been particularly high among export-oriented manufacturers in southern China’s Pearl River Delta, and a survey done in August 2015 of 570 companies in Guangdong by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Beijing’s Tsinghua University showed companies had reduced their workforces by an average of 3.5 percent from 2013 to 2014, while low-skilled workers had been cut by 5 percent. Monthly wages for workers which grew more than 10 percent annually in 2013 and 2014,  grew less than 2 percent through the first half of last year.  Downsizing in heavy industry and mining has already begun with the coal industry shedding 890,000 jobs since 2013 -- equal to all the new jobs in coal created “in the stimulus-driven boom since 2007,” -- and the steel industry laying-off 550,000 workers over the same period. 

 






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