Rising industrial unrest in China

The news reports in the last weeks about the rising industrial unrest in China are very interesting, and raise all sorts of issues which could be used in A2 lessons. I recommend these two items from the BBC website to introduce them: ‘China’s factories hit by wave of strikes’ and ‘China official newspaper calls for workers’ pay rises’.

Firstly, they might help the 21st century student to understand the rise of trade unionism in 19th century Britain, with many similar issues like exceptionally low wages to allow employers to maintain low prices and be competitive in the market, poor working conditions, autocratic management using Taylorite work measurement to ensure workers are time-efficient and disorganised workers trying to unite to gain some power over their working lives.

Secondly they raise many issues which are relevant to globalisation and to outsourcing. It may be that the gradual rise in wages for Chinese workers will feed through into higher prices being charged for their exports to the western industrialised economies, where they will feed in turn into higher inflation. On the other hand, each job in the new Chinese factories has a score of migrant workers from the countryside seeking to fill it, so do the employers really need to offer higher wages if there are plenty of potential recruits willing to work for the current low offering?

It is also relevant to Corporate Social Responsibility and Marketing strategy – should Apple continue to use the Foxconn factory to supply i-Phones and i-Pads in the wake of the spate of suicides among workers there, and can they use their influence to enforce better conditions in the factory? Do Apple customers really care enough about such issues to boycott the products and so put pressure on the company to take any action?

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