Striking Shenzhen Workers at Japanese-owned Wal-Mart Supplier Firm Demand Right to Unionize [Updated]

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[In recent weeks, a number of protests directed against Japan have erupted throughout China. The most widely reported have been sparked by anger at new Japanese school textbooks that elide discussion of World War II atrocities, by territorial conflicts over the Diaoyutai/Senkaku islands, and by the Japanese bid for a permanent Security Council seat. Participants in those protests appear to have been overwhelmingly from the ranks of students and intellectuals. The strike at the Japanese-owned Uniden factory in Shenzhen, Guangdong carries the protest movement to a new level. It is significant as one of the first actions by workers in opposition to Japanese labor practices, as well as being an action that could simultaneously impact on the American giant firm Wal-Mart that has thus far resisted Chinese government pressures to permit a union. This is an unusual example of a strike whose principal demand is the right guaranteed by Chinese law to form a union. The 12,000 workers at the plant in the heart of China's export zone, mainly women migrants from poor interior provinces, make telephones most of which end up on Wal-Mart shelves. According to a New York Times report, Uniden workers typically work eleven hour days (three hours of compulsory overtime) to earn salaries of 484 yuan (US$58) a week. The present strike, following on the heels of walkouts on November 29 and December 10, 2004, contains echoes of the strikes directed at Japanese enterprises that exploded in the 1920s fueling nationalist and revolutionary movements. It also evokes the Chinese government's worst fears during the 1989 movement upsurge: that workers might join the protests on the side of students and intellectuals. Japan Focus.]