A college graduate from the central province of Anhui has successfully filed what is believed to be China’s first HIV employment discrimination lawsuit. The plaintiff, known by his pseudonym Xiao Wu, filed an anti-discrimination lawsuit in the Yingjiang District Court in Anqing on 26 August after the Anqing education department denied him a teaching position because he was HIV positive. The court formally accepted the case on Monday August 30.

CLB examines the myriad obstacles faced by migrant workers seeking compensation for occupational illness, and outlines a series of measures to improve workplace safety and that ensure workers’ rights are protected. Photo of Zhang Haichao.

Twenty-one flight attendants were on 9 March awarded a total of one million yuan in compensation after their monthly pay was slashed from 10,000 yuan to just 800 yuan. A Beijing court found that Xinhua Airlines, a Beijing-based subsidiary of Hainan Airlines, had no legal grounds for cutting the cabin crew’s salaries in September 2008 and ordered it to make up the shortfall in wages

China’s Supreme Court announced Thursday that the number of labour disputes handled by the country’s courts increased by a further 10.8 percent last year, after nearly doubling in 2008. In total, there were 317,000 labour dispute cases in 2009, Supreme People’s Court President, Wang Shengjun, stated in his work report to the National People’s Congress, compared with just 126,000 such cases in 2006.

Western media coverage of China tends to be dominated by two competing narratives. The first is all about economics. China, it contends, is an epochal success story. The economy is booming and national wealth is on the rise. The Chinese themselves are overwhelmingly satisfied with their lot. There's nowhere to go but up. The second focuses on politics. China is in the grip of communist party dictatorship. People have no democratic rights. Everywhere you turn, there is social turmoil -- seething popular anger over corruption, environmental degradation, illegal land grabs, and summary arrests. Something's got to give. To be sure, both of these interpretations contain grains of truth. But it turns out that there's another way of comprehending the reality of modern-day China -- one that captures the contradictions of the place and allows them to co-exist.

The Guangzhou federation of trade unions is investigating why a trade union official at a Japanese owned company in the city recommended that a victim of sexual harassment be sacked. The 28 year-old office worker (Ms A) was dismissed in January this year after complaining about the blatant sexual harassment of her Japanese boss, which was caught on camera.

Despite government moves to eradicate employment discrimination against people with HBV, the virus that causes Hepatitis B, employers still routinely refuse to hire HBV-positive job candidates, and there is still a widespread fear and misunderstanding of the disease in Chinese society, according to a new research report by the HBV activist and support group, Yirenping

A 25 year-old university graduate with Hepatitis B has, for the first time in China, successfully sued a hospital for violating his right to privacy after it gave the results of his blood test to a prospective employer.

The authorities in China’s manufacturing heartland, Dongguan, are attempting to limit and control the activities of citizen agents (公民代理人), self-trained labour rights advocates who help workers who cannot afford professional legal services file labour dispute cases at arbitration hearings and courts.