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In China an illegal strike at a car parts factory in June won workers a small pay increase bringing their monthly salary to $29.30 a month. The strike was one of many in an unprecedented wave of worker-initiated labor organizing that has forced the Chinese government to change the way it does business with labor. In Guangdong Province, one of the most prosperous in the country, new regulations were just passed that facilitate the initiation of collective bargaining negotiations. Limiting the new rules to one province is seen as a sort-of trial run, setting the stage for national reforms. China’s push to modernize its economy has pushed labor issues to the forefront as a younger generation of workers is pulled to work from rural areas into urban centers. Working conditions in Chinese factories have always been harsh, but this new generation feels entitled to economic mobility and seems more comfortable questioning authority. The increasingly sophisticated workforce is not willing to, as one worker put it, “be humiliated like our parents were.” It is common for employees at electronics manufacturing plants to work 24 hour shifts, and an estimated 600,000 workers literally die from exhaustion annually. Chinese workers have seen their wages decrease as a portion of China’s Gross Domestic Product for 22 years.

GUEST: Robert Weil, author of Red Cat, White Cat: China and the Contradictions of ‘Market Socialism and has written many articles and papers on Chinese political economy, social conditions, and class relations.