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Letter from the Editors
China has experienced a decline in birth rates and an aging population in recent years, which poses challenges for maintaining a sustainable workforce in the long term. Following the recent implementation of an extension to the retirement age, the State Council introduced new measures to support childbirth on 28 October. These measures focus on expanding maternity insurance coverage, improving the enforcement of maternity leave policies (with some provinces extending paid maternity leave to 158 days), providing tax deductions for childbirth, and increasing financial support for medical care and childcare services.
The primary objective of these new policies is to encourage and support childbirth, ensuring stable population growth in the long run. However, the effectiveness of these measures in the current employment environment for Chinese workers remains uncertain.
In China's manufacturing factories, workers frequently endure long shifts, typically from 8 AM to 8 PM, with only two days off per month. When asked to switch to a standard "5-day, 8-hour" work schedule, many workers protest because the basic salary under this standard is insufficient to support their families. The combination of low minimum wages and extended overtime working hours has resulted in numerous workers clocking over 300 hours per month. Similarly, white-collar workers in private enterprises and delivery workers for platforms often work overtime to meet performance targets. These excessively long hours adversely affect workers' physical and mental health, leaving them with little energy for family, childcare, or personal development.
To improve the birth rate, it would be more effective to first reduce working hours for employees by strictly enforcing the standard working hours outlined in the Chinese Labour Law.
Thanks for reading!
CLB editors
CLB Insights
Photo: Monthly income of nurses in China 2016
Workers in public hospitals in China are employed in three main ways: formal employees of public institutions, contract workers, and temporary workers. Formal employees enjoy a stable job with higher pay and better benefits than contract and temporary workers, while contract workers have more security than temporary workers.
Between 2014 to 2023, CLB’s Strike Map has recorded 28 incidents demanding equal treatment from the informally employed healthcare workers. Of which, ten of the 28 incidents were joint actions by doctors and nurses, and nine were by nurses only. The phenomenon of unequal pay for equal work was the most prominent between formal and informal nurses.
To limit the expenditure paid to workers, hospitals in China are reluctant to increase staff, or they prefer to hire new staff on an informal and temporary basis. For informally hired nurses, their salary was only one-third to one-half of that of the formal nurses. Some hospitals don’t even pay the social security contribution for informal nurses. Hospitals have also delayed signing long-term contracts with informal nurses or extended their internship periods. It was difficult for informal nurses to obtain formal employment, especially when a clear limit was set on the number of available places. A 2010 survey report on working conditions of nurses in China found that 57.5 percent of informal nurses believed that their pay failed to reflect their contributions, which is five per cent higher than that of formal nurses. In a similar survey done in 2016, the difference in treatment was also observed.
To read more about the protest of China’s healthcare workers, readers can check out our new report recently published.
Strike Action
Rebound in the number of workers’ strikes and protests in September. CLB’s Strike Map recorded 156 worker protests in September, a significant increase from the 86 incidents reported in August. Among these, 79 incidents were in the construction industry, accounting for half of the total (50.3%). The manufacturing and heavy industries had 44 incidents (28%), while the service and transportation sectors had 21 (13.3%) and 6 incidents (3.8%) respectively.
Most worker protests in the manufacturing sector were concentrated in Guangdong, with 22 incidents. Within the sector, the electronics industry had 14 incidents, and the apparel and footwear industries had 10 incidents. The primary reasons for these protests were unpaid wages and factory closures or relocations. For example, on 26 September, hundreds of electronics workers staged a strike to protest unpaid wages and social insurance. Workers claimed the company owed them three months' wages and one year's social insurance contribution. However, the company not only disregarded the legal violations, it claimed that workers could borrow from the company if they needed them, in effect putting workers into debt.
Employees in a bankrupt supermarket chain staged a new protest after government intervention yielded ineffective results. On 19 September, nearly a hundred employees of Fudi Sanyou Supermarket staged a protest in Xiantao, Hubei, demanding six months’ unpaid wages. In early April, employees across various branches of Fudi Supermarket in Hubei had already protested against the company's closure and demanded their unpaid wages. Employees at the Sanyou Fudi Supermarket in Xiantao even blocked traffic at one point but were dispersed by police.
Fudi Supermarket, a rural chain supermarket enterprise in Hubei Province, has been facing financial difficulties after intense competition from e-commerce and other stores over the past decade. After various branches of the supermarket were closed, the Xiantao Municipal Bureau of Commerce and Fudi Supermarket jointly issued an announcement acknowledging the disputes within the company. The bureau established a joint working group and demanded that workers and suppliers cease their collective actions. In mid-April, Fudi Supermarket entered a debt restructuring process and needed to file creditor claims by mid-July. With new workers’ protests launched, it seems that the previous intervention by the joint working group had not resolved the issues.
photo: Construction workers in Xi’an were protesting for their unpaid wages
Labour inspection brigade said they could not resolve an unpaid wage case as construction companies played the blame game. A construction labour contractor named Zhao sought help online on 27 September after he failed to get the unpaid wages for 70 workers he recruited in 2023. Zhao and 70 workers were working in a Sunac construction project in Xi’an, Shaanxi in 2023. During the working period, Zhao stated that the project contractor had already owed workers’ wages by only providing them with minimal living expenses. After the project concluded on 30 July, 2023, all the workers were still not paid, while the company and Sunac Real Estate were locked in a blame game.
When the workers sought assistance from the Labor Inspection Brigade, it claimed that they could not resolve the issue as the companies were not willing to solve it. To alleviate workers’ grievances, Zhao had to sell off assets and borrow money to pay over 30 workers their wages, but he still could not cover the wages of about 40 workers, totaling around 1.2 million yuan. By June of this year, the Sunac project informed Zhao that the company had settled its payments with the project contractor, but Zhao soon found out that the latter had absconded with the funds. The local labor inspection department’s lack of proactive measures to prevent the situation from worsening, has made the wage arrears issue for the 70-plus workers even harder to resolve.
CLB in the news
China Labour Bulletin was cited in an article published by CNN Business on the deteriorating working conditions of food delivery drivers in China, highlighting that “with platform companies monopolizing the market and algorithm development controlling the labor process, workers have little labour protections and have lost a degree of freedom”.
The article was written as delivery platforms cut into workers’ earnings, and more confrontations involving delivery drivers were circulated widely on Chinese social media. It also cited a report from the China New Employment Research Center, which stated that food delivery drivers now earn 6,803 yuan a month, almost 1,000 yuan a month less than they were making five years ago. This difference is a large amount as the national monthly average wage was only 1,838 yuan last year.
Recently investors began paying closer attention to workers' protests than ever before. Bloomberg reported that Morgan Stanley has created a China Social Dynamics Indicator. This indicator utilizes data from China’s Central Bank, the National Bureau of Statistics, and the CLB's strike map data to analyze policy shifts in China.