Interesting article on labor unrest in China

Here's hoping it may spread to those companies in the rest of the world that work for slave wages doing work that should be done here; i.e., MT, toy manufacturing, etc. If they would also strike, walkout in protest, or the myriad other things they do, maybe some of the jobs will come back home. (I can hope, can't I?)

BEIJING -- China has been hit with a recent wave of labor unrest, including strikes and partial shutdowns of factories, underscoring what experts call one of the most dramatic effects of three decades of startling growth: A seemingly endless supply of cheap labor is drying up, and workers are no longer willing to endure sweatshop-like conditions.

China's export-driven growth has long been linked to its abundance of workers -- mostly migrants from the impoverished countryside who jumped at the chance to escape a hardscrabble rural life to toil long hours in factories for meager wages.

If they were unhappy, they rarely expressed it through action, and if they did, they were quickly fired and replaced from among the hundreds of others waiting outside the factory gates.

Now all of that has started to change.

Shifting demographics, including years of effective population control through the government's "one child" policy, have left China short of younger workers, particularly in the crucial 15-25 age group that many factories rely on most. These young workers don't have to travel far from home like their parents did to find work. They are more aware of their rights. And having grown up in a more prosperous China, they are demanding a fairer share.

"The first generation of migrant workers made a lot of money compared with their poor life before," said Cai He, dean of sociology at Sun Yat-sen University. "But right now the majority of migrant workers are in their 20s. They were born in the 1980s. Most of them have no farming experience" and "are more sensitive to the disparity between the wealth of the city and their own poverty."

Cai added: "The younger people received a better education. They surf the Internet, use mobile phones and watch TV. Their awareness of their rights is much stronger than the older migrant workers."

These young workers are asserting those rights in the form of work stoppages, slowdowns and demands for higher wages and shorter hours. The unrest was highlighted by a strike that began May 17 at Honda's transmission factory in the city of Foshan, where hundreds of workers walked off the job. The Japanese carmaker had to shut its four assembly plants in China.

More here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/06/AR2010060603295.html?wpisrc=nl_headline