China

According to the Wall Street Journal, Walmart is telling its Chinese suppliers they have to repsect workers' rigths, including the right to organsie. Shame they don't do this in their own stores. Oh, and there's still the little question of who will pay for better wages and conditions. Walmart seem to think it must be someone else.

By Ann Zimmerman and Mei Fong, 23 October 2008, The Wall Street Journal Europe

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is hitting its Chinese suppliers with a slate of stringent environmental and safety mandates, just as the manufacturers face rising costs and dwindling demand for their products.

HONG KONG / MONTREAL – Sept. 24, 2008 – A large part of China's remarkable economic development has been achieved at the expense of the basic rights of millions of former state-owned enterprise workers, says a new report released today by the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin and Canada's International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, commonly known as Rights & Democracy.

From China Labour Bulletin:

In early August, campaigners in Hong Kong, backed by the Play Fair 2008 global coalition, confronted the International Olympic Committee for its failure to act on widespread exploitation of workers in the manufacture of Olympics-branded products.

Press release from Clean Clothes Campaign. Brussels, 2 July 2008:

A month before the start of the Beijing Olympics key sporting goods brands including Nike, adidas, New Balance, Umbro and Speedo are forming a ground breaking joint working group with trade unions and NGOs to explore amongst other issues how to promote trade unionism and collective bargaining as well as improving wages across the sector.

PlayFair 08 Industry Report

Did you know that a worker at a Chinese factory producing for one of Nike’s key suppliers would have to work 4,500 years at their current wage to earn as much as Nike CEO Mark Parker did in 2006?

The international trade union movement has launched a campaign to highlight abuses of workers' rights in the run-up to the summer Olympic games in Beijing.

URGENT ACTION NEEDED
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On February 13, the seventh day of the Chinese New Year, some 700 workers at the Panyu Li Chang Footwear Co. Ltd in Panyu district of Guangzhou City returned from their New Year holiday. They were expecting to receive their back wages estimated to be around 2,000 Yuan per worker and resume work. Instead, they found that the owner had stolen their wages, closed the factory and sold all the equipment. The gates to the factory and their living quarters were locked.

On 20 November, Huang Qingnan of the Dagongzhe (DGZ) Migrant Worker Centre in Shenzhen, China was seriously injured after being stabbed by two unidentified men.

Take action now at: http://www.cleanclothes.org/urgent/07-12-13.htm

The following is a summary of reports by Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) regarding labour violations at Disney suppliers in China. If you haven't already, take action by signing the
petition (link below).

Over 300 workers of the Haowei Toys factory in Shenzhen, China,
producing plastic toys for Disney, have been protesting day and night
against the violation of their labour rights...

A new report "The Story of Toys Made in China for Wal-Mart" has been published by the Hong Kong based group SACOM...

CHINA'S OLYMPIC PROMISE

Following China's successful bid for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games,
both the Chinese authorities and International Olympic Games' officials
pledged that the Beijing Olympic Games would be a catalyst for the
improvement of human rights in China.

(Reuters) - As many as 1,000 children may have been sold into slave labour in central China, enduring maiming and brutality in primitive brick kilns, state media said on Friday amid an expanding scandal about official neglect.

Some official merchandise for the 2008 Olympics in China has been made using child labour, forced overtime and low wages to boost profits, a report says. (BBC, June 07)

LBL have produced a briefing:
http://www.labourbehindthelabel.org/images/pdf/chinabriefing.pdf

You will have read about this already at www.NoSweat.org.uk but here's some more in a recent article from Schnews...