China Labour Bulletin's new English language website launched last Friday with a new format and new features. One of the new features is our magazine, a digest of new articles from the website that is designed to keep readers up to date with CLB's labour rights protection work in China.
Our new website will focus more intently on our labour rights litigation programme and on the promotion of collective bargaining and collective contracts. We have been quietly involved in labour rights litigation for about five years, and feel the time is now right to publicize our successes as well as the problems we have encountered.
Likewise, over the last two years, we have begun to promote collective contracts and collective bargaining as a means of protecting workers' rights at the factory level. We hope the implementation of the Labour Contract Law on 1 January 2008 will give a significant boost to the growth of collective contracts in China, and that China's official trade union, the ACTFU, will take this opportunity to act as a genuine representative of labour in negotiations with management, and not simply as the third-party facilitator it claims to be at present.
One of the core features of the CLB website has been Han Dongfang's radio interviews with ordinary workers and peasants across China. We have now started to translate and summarize entire interviews rather than just publish selected broadcast transcripts as in the past. We currently have five entire interview summaries on the new website, most recently the story of a group of villagers from Zhejiang who were beaten and detained after being cheated out of their land. There will be regular additions to the Workers' Voices section of the website in the New Year.
Another new feature of the website is our Resource Centre, a reference point for readers wishing to get the basic facts and figures on China's labour system. We currently have two background articles on the reform of state-owned enterprises and unemployment. More will be added in the coming months.
The new English website still links with CLB's existing Chinese language sites. The new Chinese language sites will be launched at the end of January 2008.