(BEIJING) China must guard against ‘hostile forces’ within and outside the country working to stir up trouble among its masses of newly unemployed workers, a senior trade union official said in comments published yesterday.
Beijing’s Communist Party leadership has issued repeated warnings that legions of idle rural workers gathered in the country’s struggling export hubs could pose a threat to social stability.
Clashes between police and unpaid workers locked out of failed factories have flared up across China in recent months, but the government bans independent trade unions, depriving workers of a key channel for resolving disputes.
Sun Chunlan, vice-chairman of the state-backed All-China Federation of Trade Unions, said that police taskforces had been ‘rushed’ to all regions to ‘understand the situation with regional social stability’, the Beijing News paraphrased him as saying.
Authorities needed to rigorously guard against ‘hostile forces within and outside China using the difficulties of some enterprises to infiltrate and bring trouble to rural migrant workers’, Mr. Sun said. He did not elaborate.
The government enacted a landmark labour law last year giving greater protection to the country’s 130 million migrant workers, but labour rights groups have accused officials of turning a blind eye to violations amid economic hardship to help factory owners survive the financial crisis.
Mr. Sun said China’s official trade unions would extend aid to more than 10 million migrant workers in the form of job training or ‘living assistance’.
About 20 million jobs have been lost in Guangdong province alone, southern China’s manufacturing hub where a third of the country’s exports are produced, an official from China’s top planning agency said on Tuesday.
A senior Guangdong police official on Tuesday warned of a ‘grim’ public security outlook in the province bordering Hong Kong, saying that ranks of jobless workers could be ‘tempted by crime and become a factor of instability’.
Police in neighbouring Fujian province have shot two robbery suspects, killing one, after they resisted arrest and injured five policemen during a raid, Xinhua news agency said.
The two were among nine members of a gang that carried out armed robberies at construction sites across Fujian’s Quanzhou city, injuring dozens and stealing more than one million yuan (S$223,624), the agency said, citing police.
Meanwhile, dozens of shop tenants and workers protested outside a market in Beijing’s Russian district yesterday, as part of a dispute over rent with the building’s landlord.
‘Because of the financial crisis, we are all in economic hardship, and tried to negotiate the rent down. But the boss just shut our spokesman’s shop and threw all his stock away as an example to the rest of us,’ a shop tenant surnamed Ying said.
Beijing also fears that disgruntled students unable to find jobs on graduation will be another potential headache, and has unleashed a raft of incentives to prompt employers to employ them.
An official from Beijing’s municipal labour bureau said that all unemployed graduates with permanent residence in the capital would receive ‘at least one job offer by suitable employers in the coming month’, the official China Daily newspaper said.
Beijing in June will pass the 20th anniversary of the government’s crackdown on student-led protests calling for democracy in 1989.
1 comment:
Beware hostile forces: unionist
They may stir up trouble among China’s jobless
Reuters
19 February 2009
(BEIJING) China must guard against ‘hostile forces’ within and outside the country working to stir up trouble among its masses of newly unemployed workers, a senior trade union official said in comments published yesterday.
Beijing’s Communist Party leadership has issued repeated warnings that legions of idle rural workers gathered in the country’s struggling export hubs could pose a threat to social stability.
Clashes between police and unpaid workers locked out of failed factories have flared up across China in recent months, but the government bans independent trade unions, depriving workers of a key channel for resolving disputes.
Sun Chunlan, vice-chairman of the state-backed All-China Federation of Trade Unions, said that police taskforces had been ‘rushed’ to all regions to ‘understand the situation with regional social stability’, the Beijing News paraphrased him as saying.
Authorities needed to rigorously guard against ‘hostile forces within and outside China using the difficulties of some enterprises to infiltrate and bring trouble to rural migrant workers’, Mr. Sun said. He did not elaborate.
The government enacted a landmark labour law last year giving greater protection to the country’s 130 million migrant workers, but labour rights groups have accused officials of turning a blind eye to violations amid economic hardship to help factory owners survive the financial crisis.
Mr. Sun said China’s official trade unions would extend aid to more than 10 million migrant workers in the form of job training or ‘living assistance’.
About 20 million jobs have been lost in Guangdong province alone, southern China’s manufacturing hub where a third of the country’s exports are produced, an official from China’s top planning agency said on Tuesday.
A senior Guangdong police official on Tuesday warned of a ‘grim’ public security outlook in the province bordering Hong Kong, saying that ranks of jobless workers could be ‘tempted by crime and become a factor of instability’.
Police in neighbouring Fujian province have shot two robbery suspects, killing one, after they resisted arrest and injured five policemen during a raid, Xinhua news agency said.
The two were among nine members of a gang that carried out armed robberies at construction sites across Fujian’s Quanzhou city, injuring dozens and stealing more than one million yuan (S$223,624), the agency said, citing police.
Meanwhile, dozens of shop tenants and workers protested outside a market in Beijing’s Russian district yesterday, as part of a dispute over rent with the building’s landlord.
‘Because of the financial crisis, we are all in economic hardship, and tried to negotiate the rent down. But the boss just shut our spokesman’s shop and threw all his stock away as an example to the rest of us,’ a shop tenant surnamed Ying said.
Beijing also fears that disgruntled students unable to find jobs on graduation will be another potential headache, and has unleashed a raft of incentives to prompt employers to employ them.
An official from Beijing’s municipal labour bureau said that all unemployed graduates with permanent residence in the capital would receive ‘at least one job offer by suitable employers in the coming month’, the official China Daily newspaper said.
Beijing in June will pass the 20th anniversary of the government’s crackdown on student-led protests calling for democracy in 1989.
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