CHANG’AN, China — Wang Denggui, father of three, arrived more than a year ago in the palm-lined streets of this southern town with a single goal: toil in a factory to save for his children’s school tuition.

But the plans of Mr. Wang and thousands of co-workers unraveled at noon on Nov. 1, when the Taiwanese chairman of their ailing shoe factory climbed over a factory wall to flee the country and his debts. That left several American shoe companies with unfilled orders and 2,000 workers without jobs.

“He just ran without telling anyone,” Mr. Wang said.

For decades, the steamy Pearl River Delta area of southern Guangdong Province served as a primary engine for China’s astounding economic growth. But an export slowdown that began earlier this year and that has been magnified by the global financial crisis of recent months is contributing to the shutdown of tens of thousands of small and mid-size factories here and in other coastal regions, forcing laborers to scramble for other jobs or return home to the countryside…

Peter Ford discusses China’s unions, past and present:
“Once upon a time, when the Chinese Communist Party was fighting for a revolution, the trade unions that the party controlled were important pieces in the political chess game. Ever since 1949, however, the unions grouped in the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the only federation allowed to exist, have simply been pawns of the government. Totally toothless, they were reduced to the role of organizing works outings and putting up large character banners proclaiming the government’s latest policies… But nowadays, the Chinese government is beginning to think twice about the social and economic costs of its headlong rush to development…”

The government reports a deadly gas explosion in a mine:

“BEIJING (AFP) - - Eighteen miners are confirmed dead after a gas explosion ripped through a coal mine in northeast China, the State Administration of Work Safety said Tuesday.

The accident happened Monday at Baijiagou Coal Mine in Faku county, Liaoning province, the safety agency said in a brief statement.”

A BBC documentary on the dollar-a-day half of China.

“According to some experts, nearly half of Beijing’s population are now migrant workers. 19-year-old Jiang Xiaoli is part of what is perhaps the biggest migration that’s ever taken place anywhere. Her home province is one of the poorest in China, and now she’s found a job as a domestic worker in the capital…”
“She get up 6 in morning, to clean up the house, and until the baby sleeps about 10 in the evening, she cannot have a rest…”
…
“Now Jiang Xiaoli sends most of her money home. She’s replaced her parents’ small, old black-and-white tv with a bigger color one, and she’s also paid for her two younger sisters to go to school. The family couldn’t afford it before. But Xiaoli’s paid a price for being away from home, too. As we’ve been chatting, there have been tears streaming down her face…”

With 3 Chinese labor laws recently put into effect, Kinglun Ngok’s study of labor policy is increasingly relevant:

“Skeptics would suggest that laws on the books have little practical, let alone political, significance in a country like China where the rule of law is notoriously weak and the judiciary is anything but independent. Yet, scholars who have studied the processes of labor conflict, legal mobilization and official methods of resolution find that laws and regulations do matter, albeit never in entirely predictable ways. First, because Chinese workers cannot organize their own independent unions, and official unions are politically constrained to confront employers, the law becomes a major institutional realm in which workers defend their interests. Chinese labor policy scholars have concluded that this is exactly the reason why the Chinese government, concerned to achieve social stability and reduce the power imbalance between workers and employers, has emphasized legal reform. Second, the law matters because aggrieved workers take the law seriously and invoke specific legal stipulations in pressing employers to yield to their demands related to wages, hours of work, termination compensation and insurance contribution. Third, over the years, the scope of labor legislation has expanded to regulate not just employee-employer relation but also the behavior of local governments. This is evident in the new Employment Promotion Law, which stipulates that local governments have the legal responsibility to guarantee equality in employment and devise measures to eradicate discrimination based on disability and gender. Such laws provide labor activists the ground on which to contest worker rights.”

PRI’s Mary Kay Magistad reports from Shenzhen on the largest migration in the history of the world — China’s rapid urbanization — which has turned former fishing villages like Shenzhen into mega-cities.