InfoAnda - Today's Chinese workers wise up -- and rise up

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Yahoo! My Yahoo! Mail More Yahoo! Services Account Options New User? Sign Up Sign In Help Yahoo! Search web search Home Singapore Asia Pacific World Business Entertainment Sports Technology Singapore Asia Pacific World Today's Chinese workers wise up -- and rise up AFP - Saturday, June 26 Send IM Story Print Today's Chinese workers wise up -- and rise up FOSHAN, China (AFP) - – Sporting trendy clothes and flashy hairstyles, today's Chinese factory workers are a different breed from the ragtag peasants who helped launch the nation's spectacular economic boom. Young workers involved in a rash of recent strikes in southern China for better pay and conditions bristle at the term "cheap labour" and insist today's workforce will not accept what their forebears endured. "The demands of the generation before us were based on survival and staying warm and fed," said a worker surnamed Chen, 25, who is employed at a factory producing exhaust systems for Honda in the southern city of Foshan. "Our demands are higher because we have higher material and spiritual needs. Our strike demands are based on the need to maintain our living standards," he told AFP, asking that his full name not be used out of fear of being fired. His hair dyed a trendy brown, Chen is one of many who went on strike in this city in Guangdong province, the manufacturing hub that has been vital to China's stunning export-led growth. He demanded more pay not only to meet rising living costs but to allow him to accumulate some savings for the first time in the five years he has worked here. China's economic boom started three decades ago when foreign-backed factories sprang up along its southern and eastern seaboards, attracting hundreds of millions of rural migrants seeking work. The first generation worked long hours in often poor conditions but were able to send money back to their families, helping them build new homes and raise living standards in their rural villages. Raised in those boom times, China's new generation of workers are less willing to accept hard work for low pay -- and are increasingly assertive about exercising their own economic clout as labourers. The strike at Chen's Foshan Fengfu Auto Parts factory helped idle the China assembly plants of Japanese giant Honda earlier this month and won them a basic pay increase to 1,500 yuan (220 dollars) a month, up about 300 yuan. Yet workers remain angry, calling the rise insufficient in an era of inflation and accusing the government and state-controlled labour union of siding with management to keep salaries low and the factories humming. "I would like to send money home to my parents, but I can't save a cent," Song Mafei, 22, a worker at the nearby overseas-funded Ichikoh Valeo Auto Lighting Systems Company. "My parents are happy that I found a job but they don't expect anything from me because they know I can barely live off the salary I make." Song got a raise after a strike at his plant last month but the overtime work on which employees rely to supplement their basic pay was cut back. He now makes less than before. Workers today readily toss out terms such as "human rights" and many are knowledgeable of new safeguards such as a comprehensive new labour law passed in 2008. The law, spelling out a broad range of protections for workers, was enacted amid growing official concern over the potential for labour unrest and massively publicised by the country's state-run media. "In China, human rights have always been hard to realise," said a worker at Foshan Fengfu who gave only his surname Li. "But safeguarding your own rights is always legitimate... if people are oppressed they must rebel. This is only natural." The reluctance to accept unattractive factory work has led to a labour shortage in China's coastal regions and especially in Guangdong, greatly worrying exporters still recovering from the global economic downturn. Earlier this year, manufacturing powerhouse Zhejiang province said it had 383 jobs for every 100 registered job seekers, while Guangdong said its plants were short of about 900,000 workers in February. Factories are having to make do with "young unskilled workers who have little work experience or training," Mao Pingwu, 30, a 10-year veteran of Guangdong ceramics and electronic factories, told AFP. "Even though it is hard to save money, these workers have no other choice, so they put up with the low wages," he said. Mao, who is from central China's Hunan province and who now makes about 5,000 yuan a month as a taxi driver -- much more than most plant workers -- said he would never return to the factories. 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