By Bloomberg News
July 27 (Bloomberg) -- China’s Jilin provincial government ordered Jianlong Group to abandon a buyout of state-owned Tonghua Iron & Steel Group after workers protesting job losses killed a manager, state-run Beijing News said today.
The instruction, announced via Jilin’s television network last night, also ordered Beijing-based Jianlong to never again take part in any restructuring plan of Tonghua, the newspaper said. Closely held Jianlong had been Tonghua’s second-largest shareholder since 2005, Xinhua News Agency said separately.
The incident underscores the increasingly violent disputes in the country from northwestern Xinjiang province to southern Guangdong, as the global economic crisis brings simmering conflicts to a head, said Liu Kaiming, a labor-relations researcher in China. As many as 7 million Chinese college graduates will need jobs this year, adding to the 20 million job seekers every year, according to government figures.
“Many ordinary people in China are now filled with pent-up frustrations as they see their livelihood diminish with the economic crisis,” said Liu, executive director of the Institute of Contemporary Observation in Shenzhen. “It’s spreading from north to south, and many tiny disputes can easily be inflamed into major clashes.”
Up to 1,000 workers gathered at Tonghua’s factory in northeastern China’s Changchun city yesterday morning, demanding to meet manager Chen Guojun, appointed by Jianlong on July 22 to oversee the steel plant’s operation, Beijing News said. The workers refused Chen’s order to return to work, battered him with boots and pushed him from a second-storey office, the newspaper said, without citing a source for its information.
Clashes at Tonghua
A Jianlong official, who would only give her surname Peng, confirmed today that Chen was an employee, declining to comment further.
Chen died at about 6 p.m., Beijing News said. Workers continued blocking his office, preventing medical staff from reaching him. Police were pelted with water bottles when they arrived to restore order, it said.
The company had wanted to cut the number of workers at the factory to 5,000 from 30,000 now, Xinhua reported, citing an unidentified police officer investigating the case.
Tonghua Workers also blocked a railway track and prevented supplies reaching the steel mill, forcing the company to suspend production for 11 hours, Beijing News said. Protestors abandoned their blockade about an hour after Tonghua announced Jianlong’s withdrawal through the 9 p.m. Jilin television broadcast, the newspaper said.
Increasing Clashes
The number of China’s labor disputes rose 98 percent to 237,000 cases last year involving 1.2 million people, according to the National Bureau of Statistics and Ministry of Human Resources in May.
Ethnic clashes this month between the Han Chinese and Muslim Uighur communities in northwestern China’s Xinjiang province killed more than 190 people, with thousands of people injured and arrested.
“Disputes in southern China used to involve unpaid wages, while other parts of China saw disputes over land seizures,” said Liu, whose organization is partly funded by the Ford Foundation. “Now with the crisis, many more causes are contributing to clashes and the trend is heading for the worse.”
Closely held Jianlong, set up in 1999, owns businesses in steelmaking, shipbuilding and machineries. The company ranked 158 out of China’s 500-largest companies, with 40.79 billion yuan ($6 billion) in 2008 sales, according to its Web site.
Tonghua produces 7 million tons of steel a year, according to its Web site. It ranks 244th among China’s top 500 enterprises. The company posted a profit of 42.8 million yuan in June, reversing a loss from last year’s same period, according to its Web site.
Calls to the company’s head office in northeastern China’s Changchun city weren’t answered. A police officer, who answered the phone at the Tonghua district public security bureau, declined to comment.
For Related News and Information: Top Stories: TOP
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment