[translation provided by BHRRC]

Since 2023, factories in Guangdong Province have closed down and relocated one after another. Enterprises have delayed wages and laid off employees on a large scale, which has aroused more and more workers to protest. From the fourth quarter of 2022 to the first quarter of 2023, the number of manufacturing protest cases recorded in the China Labour Bulletin workers' collective action map continued to rise. The number of worker protests increased by more than ten times.

In addition to asking for wages, workers are increasingly demanding issues related to factory relocation/closing, monetary compensation, and social insurance. Statistics from China Labour Bulletin's e-newsletter in the past two months have shown that the electronics industry is the most protested by manufacturing workers, followed by the clothing industry, toys, automobiles, machinery and metal processing and other sectors.

China's trade data show that the total value of exports has gradually decreased from July 2022 to February 2023. Taking the consumer electronics industry as an example, in order to win orders, midstream factories such as circuit boards and copper foil substrates cut prices to compete. The average price reduction of many low-end products is about 10% to 15%, and the price reduction of some products exceeds 20%. For factories that cannot find orders at cut prices, business owners are in arrears with workers' wages and social insurance, hoping that order demand will recover in the short term. Some business owners closed the factories and relocated, sold their assets, forced workers to leave their jobs, and reinvested after the economic cycle resumed.

[...]

From the beginning of January, the China Labour Bulletin has recorded 88 protests by manufacturing workers. The contraction of the export manufacturing industry in the coastal area is pronounced, but the focus of the labour union's work is still following the previous policy. [...] When workers' dissatisfaction and labour conflicts break out, they work with the government to maintain stability. When the economic situation changes, trade unions should take the initiative to understand the operating conditions of the enterprises in the region they belong to and organise workers to negotiate with the enterprises that have initially shown signs of wage arrears and social insurance arrears to reduce the impact on the interests of workers during the economic recession.