Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Global Crisis Hits Chinese Migrant Workers
Millions of workers who flooded to China's booming coastal cities to find work during the past decade are now beginning to return home amid a wave of factory closures and unemployment sparked by the global financial crisis.
In a phenomenon more usual around the Lunar New Year holiday in late January, trains and long-distance bus networks are packed full of people heading west and inland, making tickets hard to come by as people head home to cut losses and be reunited with their families.
"A lot of people are workers returning to their family homes," one passenger on a packed train in southwestern China's Yunnan province said.
Factory closures and rising unemployment in the Pearl River Delta and eastern coastal regions are also sparking labor unrest, as workers stage demonstrations to demand their back pay and severance benefits from factories now in administration.
We detained a few people who were making trouble."
Bao'an police officer
Police in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen detained eight former workers for the now bankrupt Hong Kong-invested watchmaker Yijinli following days of sit-ins and clashes with hundreds of workers who had not yet been paid by the administrators.
"There were about six or seven security personnel detaining one person," a former Yijinli worker surnamed Ou said of clashes that began Friday in the city's Bao'an district.
Click here to continue.
Thursday, 6 November 2008
RFA reports:
Posts
