“The plight of millions of migrant workers toiling for meagre wages in southern China has been thrown under the spotlight by a three-day textile worker riot. It started after security guards beat up an employee for jumping a meal queue.
Dozens of people were injured in the riot this week at the Nanxuan Wool Textile Factory, hospital staff said yesterday in the local town of Shuikou, Guangdong province. The violence involved thousands of people but was quelled on Thursday, allowing workers to return. The scale of the riot made it one of the worst incidents of industrial unrest reported in China since one that erupted in Yangjiazhangzi, a north-eastern mining town, in early 2000, when some 20,000 people rioted after their redundancy payments were siphoned off by corrupt officials.”
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Copyright P. Kerim Friedman.