Workers seeking back pay from negligent employers have been attacked by thugs, detained by police and threatened not to talk to the foreign media. On 15 January 2008, Wang Chao a migrant worker from Sichuan had an arm chopped off by hired thugs from the construction company in Nanjing when he attempted to obtain the wages owed him. And on 30 January, more than 20 workers laid-off from a construction company in Sichuan were detained by police after they marched on the municipal government to demand their wages.

 

In 2004, several hundred taxi drivers in Dazhou city, Sichuan province, were ordered by the local government to re-purchase their taxi licenses, despite the fact that they had already bought them some years earlier on what they were officially told at the time would be a permanent basis. After attempting without success to negotiate with the local government, the taxi drivers then staged a series of mass public demonstrations in Dazhou city centre over a several-month period in 2004.

 

During the 1960s, a group of women workers from Tongchuan, Shanxi Province, were instructed by the government to move permanently from the city to the countryside to help open up remote tracts of rural wasteland. Only when they reached retirement age did they discover, according to local officials, that by doing so they had "forfeited" all right to receive their state retirement pensions. CLB has found a lawyer to represent nearly 500 of these women in a class-action lawsuit against the Tongchuan government, and we are now awaiting a date for the initial court hearing.

The Xianyang textile workers' strike was a major event in the recent history of China's labour movement for several reasons. The number of workers who took part in the strike – over 6,800 – is highly significant, as is the fact that most of these workers were women. And the length of the strike – almost seven weeks – makes it probably the longest recorded industrial action in China's post-1949 history.