To Mr. Xu Qin, Mayor of Shenzhen City, Mrs. Luoli, President of the municipal federation in Shenzhen We are writing to ask the Mayor of Shenzhen City and the municipal federation in Shenzhen to step in and give assistance in cases of Wu Guijun from Diweixin Product Factory in which worker are criminalized for the industrial actions they took to claim their labour rights. Wu was arrested by unknown reason more than 130 days! Illegal detention of WU Guijun for more than a hundred days On 23 May Wu Guijun and nearly 200 workers from Diweixin Product Factory located in Shenzhen were arrested by the anti-riot police on the way to petition the Shiyan district government. They were asking the government to intervene in the one-month long severance negotiation with their employer which was closing down business for relocation from its Shenzhen plant to Huizhou city. Few days after the arrest, the factory management terminated the negotiation with the workers and sacked all the representatives including Wu Guijun. Since his detention on 23 May, Wu was denied free access to his lawyer and family. He is likely to be criminalized and charged by the public security for “assembling a crowd to disturb public order”. Free Wu Guijun! We regret to find that in this case, Wu and other worker leaders were alone in their struggle without receiving support from the trade union. We are concerned that industrial actions taken by workers for claiming their legal rights were put under criminal detention and charged. Although strike is not protected in the domestic laws, freedom of assembly is protected in the PRC Constitution. Our demands: 1. Defend the Worker’s Right to Strike! 2. Protect the Worker leader in the Strike! 3. Urge to give pressure to the government for the release of Mr. Wu and provide all the needed assistance to Mr. Wu and his family. CC to ： Mr. Huang yebin, Chairman of the Guangdong Provincial Federation of Trade Unions Mr. Zhu xiaodan, the Governor of Guangdong Province Contact：FUNG +852 64820109 (HK)； +86 14716140109 (China) By Globalization Monitor、Asia Monitor Resource Centre

Sa LAW, Left 21 A sensational story in the news about an abused Indonesian domestic worker has given Hong Kong society a chance to see the reality underlying Hong Kong’s free economy and the simultaneous high female participation rate (48%) of our Hong Kong labour force – the unfree labour of female migrant domestic workers. On 18 September at Wanchai District Court, the two Hong Kong employers who had been charged with physical and other abuses of an Indonesian domestic worker named Kartika, were finally found guilty of most of the charges and sentenced to jail terms. Aside from the case details revealed in the hearings, which included tying up the worker each night to sleep in the toilet and repeated occasions of beating the worker with shoes, a bike chain or hot iron, the verdict of the judge also reflects the general attitude of the government, which places domestic workers like Kartika in such vulnerable situations through its policies.

About 4,000 Cambodian garment workers have protested in Phnom Penh after a factory supplying global brands including GAP and H&M fired hundreds of their colleagues for striking over insufficient wages. The demonstrators said on Thursday that the Singapore-owned SL Garment Processing factory fired 720 workers a day earlier while more than 5,000 others were suspended after a two-week long strike.

HUNDREDS of workers of the Yantian International Container Terminal (YICT) went on a strike on September 1 and 2 to petition for more pay, Shenzhen Economic Daily reports. The strike halted operations at the terminal and caused a long queue of container trucks waiting to go into the terminal that was extended from the terminal gates to the highway.

Social movements and civil society organizations from different parts of the world have met on 3 -4 September 2013 in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on the eve of the G20 Summit and in a context of the threat by the United States of America (USA) to attack Syria. With the participation of more than 30 international delegates of world social movements, our G20 Counter-Summit, was hosted by the Post-Globalization Initiative.

A Hong Kong couple left their Indonesian domestic helper without food or water after tying her to a chair and forcing her to wear a diaper while they went on five-day vacation, a report said Saturday. The pair, 42-year-old Tai Chi-wai and his 41-year-old wife Catherine Au were in court Friday for "assault occasioning actual bodily harm" according to the city's official Judiciary website.

Matthew Boesler Aug. 19, 2013, 11:13 AM The Economist's "Big Mac index" is a fun way of measuring relative prices in different countries after adjusting for the nominal exchange rate between different countries' currencies.

http://pglobal.org/events/481/  On the 3rd and 4th of September a large scale international Counter Summit, intended as an alternative to the September Summit of the G20, will be held in St Petersburg, Russia. It will take place at the Международный Деловой Центр, nab.reki Smolenki 2.  Organized by the Post Globalization Initiative, the Summit’s ambition is to develop new principles of economic and social policy which are not based on the Washington Consensus. As part of the Summit, world renowned experts, economists, politicians, and social scientists from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas will come together for panel discussions, seminars, and public lectures. 

Tuesday, 27 August, 2013, 10:56am Lo Wei and Anita Lam Workers with their "On strike!" signs press for changes to regulations imposed on them by their employer on Monday. Photo: Sam Tsang More than 200 workers went on strike at the express railway construction site in Kwai Chung yesterday after they were told to eat their lunch underground and warned their pay would be docked if they were late.

Sunday, July 7, 2013 June 28 the parents of MORI Mina, who killed herself due to overwork at Watami, visited Liberal Democratic Party headquarters to ask party leaders why it was sending a person who intentionally killed their daughter to the parliament. WATANABE Miki, ex-president of the Watami fast-food restaurant chain, is going to stand for the upcoming upper house election from the LDP in the proportional representation constituency. Mori’s father, Takeshi, strongly criticized Mori at the press conference. “Watami’s motto is ‘Work 24 hours a day 365 days a year till your die’. So I can say the company deliberately killed my daughter. They employed her with the intention to kill her and made her work for low wages and said they were not accountable for her death. I should call him a hardened criminal.” When asked what he was going to ask the Party, Mori replied,” I just want to ask ‘Are you really going to run someone like him as a candidate?’.” (MATSUMOTO Chie)