MinGong 2008, Acknowledgement of the shadow’s workers.

Your Corporate Social responsibility Partner

Image servant de lettrine Last month, I was talking about the huge migration of Chinese New Year. Once again I talk about China as the recent event shows that this migration as deep repercussion in the world factory.

In the early March, has started the annual session on the Chinese parliament. This year three new deputies have settled in Beijing. They are the representatives of the Mingong, the migrant workers. Despite they are all coming from the communist party, they are also all former Mingong. This alone is a strong sign that the government takes Mingong into account.
Another interesting event is the success of Lin Qi. She is still a migrant worker but for most of Chinese, she is also one of the most famous poets of China. At 27 years old, she was included in Women of China magazine’s list of the top 10 Chinese women of 2007. She claimed that her experience on an assembly line was one of her main stream of inspiration. What is noticeable is not that she is writing, but that she has been recognized despite she is writing on migrant workers.
In fact you have more articles about Mingong in Chinese newspapers since few months than you have had in several years before, and no daily issue hasn’t got its “Mingong article”.

It is important too understand what the situation of migrant workers is. It is not only people leaving there hometown to look for a job. Once they arrive in the eastern cities (the most developed area of China), they loose most of their rights as they are not from the city. China is highly federative and city and province have lot of freedom to rule specific regulations (Minimum wages for example depends on the city level). Thus many rules are discriminatory against people who are not from the city. Schools for example are most of the times only for children from the city. Social insurance and every other thing managed by the cities are de facto not for Mingong.
Yet with 200 millions of people, Mingong can’t be called negligible. Actually, the Chinese economic gross is for an important part the result of the Mingong work. They are the one who work to build skyscrapers, metro and infrastructure in big cities, they are the one working on assembly line of all industries,… If they participate to the economic growth they don’t benefit much of it and this situation can’t continue for very long. Thus the government has started to focus on these workers in application of its motto “harmonious development”. In WethicA we think it’s a great opportunity to get great improvement in working conditions in factories in the coming years.

Actually the government has no real choice but taking them into account. The difficulties met by factories of Guangdong to hire workers in 2007, the number of strike at the end of last year, the proportion of migrant workers in certain cities make them as potential destabilization force, especially because of their youth, the partially broken social link with their family and their natural instability as permanent migrant workers.

It’s too early to know what would be the future of Mingong, but let’s hope their effort will be paid back.

Previous newsletter -- All newsletter -- Next newsletter

Release date: 2008-03-18

If you want to receive these newsletter directly in your emailbox, please subscribe for free here: Subcribtion

Newsletters by WethicA is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.wethica.com/newsletter_list.php.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at contact@wethica.com.

We would love to have your comments. Please don't hesitate to use the form below

From	Comment
seadorsesserb wrote on 23/07/2008	This comment has been delated as it was only a link to another website. It was to avoid dangerous links.

May we remind you this place is fully open and WethicA is not responsible of the purpose on the above comments . However, WethicA may decide to delete any post judge as against the politeness or the ethic.

Pseudo :	Message :	To avoid bots, please copy the below word:
		SA8000