As the National People’s Congress meets in Beijing to discuss a slowdown in economic growth and policies to support the poor, two new reports detail abuses of migrant workers in Chinese factories. From Amnesty International’s new report, “Internal migrants: Discrimination and abuse: The human cost of an economic ‘miracle'”:
Tens of millions of migrants are denied rights to adequate health care and housing, and are excluded from the wide array of state benefits available to permanent urban residents.(4) They experience discrimination in the workplace, and are routinely exposed to some of the most exploitative conditions of work. Internal migrants’ insecure legal status, social isolation, sense of cultural inferiority and relative lack of knowledge of their rights leaves them particularly vulnerable, enabling employers to deny their rights with impunity. The children of internal migrants do not have equal access to free, compulsory, education, and many of them have to be left behind in the countryside. [Full text]
And a new report from the National Labor Committee details conditions at the Kaisi Metals Company, which supplies American companies.
