Working in China

Hey everyone,

This week we get to look at employment relations in China which seems very interesting.

The first thing that caught my eye when reading over some of the lecture slides earlier was 'informal workers'. This seems to be the use of informal employment where most employees are only employed on  temporary, seasonal, casual, and hourly-paid work and has apparently long existed in China. In the urban areas over 150 million of these workers live and can be hired and fired at will with very little job security overall. I found this very interesting, not that i didn't expect it, but because for me China is a country I don't read much in to at all.

While reading these few slides about 'informal workers' I decided that I would try and find some sort of an article or reference to see whether or not this informal work is really as bad as it seems in China. I ended up finding this article from 2010 which explores how bad certain conditions are in one anonymous Chinese supplier who supplies to Disney and Tesco.

Here are the facts:

• Employees are required 13.5 hours a day during peak seasons.
• Employees are at the factory for at least 96 hours per week while working for at least 81 hours with mandatory overtime.
• Overtime work hours per month are more than 100 hours and up to 130 hours which well exceed the permissible overtime hours stipulated by the 1995 Labor Law in China.
• Employees are paid as low as $0.66/hour.
• Machines are not subject to regular maintenance.
• In March 2010, an employee wounded her finger when operating a machine. The employee did not receive proper medical treatments for the crush injury.
• The factory does not educate employees on occupational health and safety.
• The factory withholds employees’ ID cards for 3 days upon recruitment in direct violation of Chinese law.
• Many workers at the factory do not have social insurance.

To no surprise I found that these cases and stories of informal workers and their problems withing the Chinese employment relations system are very true. But the quick point that I would like to make is that yes the Chinese government are more than responsible for not looking after or mediating ER practices in China. But for a long time nations such as Australia and the US have always had most of their products made in China because 'it is cheaper' due to labor costs etc. So quite possibly the fact that these wrong ER practices in China have never changed are because of us big nations ultimately. What does everyone think?

I think this picture sort of gets my point across :)

And my other link: http://www.chinalaborwatch.org/report/37