Surge in strikes at Chinese factories after Covid rules end

theguardian.com:

Protests in China are often small- scale. On 17 May, a handful of workers at an air-purifier factory in Xiamen, a coastal city in Fujian province, south-east China, gathered to demand the payment of wages that, they said, were in arrears. The protest was quiet, but it was one of nearly 30 similar demonstrations this month alone.

With China’s factories reopened and draconian coronavirus measures abandoned, workers are also going on strike at a remarkable rate.

This year in China there have already been at least 130 factory strikes, more than triple the number in the whole of 2022, according to data compiled by the China Labour Bulletin (CLB), a Hong Kong-based non-governmental organisation.

The CLB’s database is far from comprehensive – by its own estimate, it captures about 5%-10% of all incidents of collective action in China. But in the absence of any official statistics, the CLB provides a snapshot of the disputes and negotiations that are happening across the country.

And this year, China seems to be entering a “new era” of post-Covid factory strikes, said Eli Friedman, a professor at the school of industrial and labour relations at Cornell University in New York.

For most of the strikes, the root cause is money. Although China’s economy is gradually recovering from the battering it took during three years of strict zero-Covid measures, factories are still struggling. And the worsening political relations between the US and China are starting to make themselves felt in the economy. In a monthly government survey of 3,000 factories across China, all 13 indicators of economic activity – including new orders and prices – declined in April.

With money tight, many factories have resorted to not paying workers, paying them late