Today’s Chinese workers wise up — and rise up focus 06/27/2010

Today’s Chinese workers wise up — and rise up

focus 06/27/2010 FOSHAN — Sporting trendy clothes and flashy hairstyles, today’s Chinese factory workers are a different breed from the ragtag peasants who helped launch the nation’s spectacular economic boom. Young workers involved in a rash of recent strikes in southern China for better pay and conditions bristle at the term “cheap labor” and insist today’s workforce will not accept what their forebears endured. “The demands of the generation before us were based on survival and staying warm and fed,” said a worker surnamed Chen, 25, who is employed at a factory producing exhaust systems for Honda in the southern city of Foshan. “Our demands are higher because we have higher material and spiritual needs. Our strike demands are based on the need to maintain our living standards,” he told AFP, asking that his full name not be used out of fear of being fired..... MORE Source:  The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100627com7.html

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