A group of female workers have been on strike since 10 December at a Japanese wireless phone factory in Shenzhen which supplies in large number to giant American retailer Wal-Mart, a news report said.

The New York Times reported on 16 December that production had stopped in the Uniden Factory, which employs 12,000 workers, mostly young women from poor interior provinces.

Before going on strike, the female workers had drawn up a list of grievances, including dissatisfaction over low wages and abusive working conditions, according to the report.

Wal-Mart has recently been in the media spotlight when Chinese authorities insisted that the retail giant allow its workers to join unions, obviously government-sanctioned ones.

The strikers said they had to work an 11 hour day, which included three hours of mandatory overtime, for a wage of only 484 Yuan a month. They also said that half of their monthly wage went to pay for accommodation in the company dormitories.

Japanese officials at Uniden Factory refused to comment, while a Chinese manager at the factory said the strike had ended and added: "A group of workers’ contracts have reached termination, and the company, in compliance with labour laws, did not offer them a new contract."

Liu Shuangyan, from Hunan Province, said: "I haven’t been able to save any money. You have to eat. You buy a few clothes, and then there’s nothing left." She added: "If you get sick, they won't give you leave unless it is very serious."

Some of the workers said they had little idea of what a union was, but they wanted some kind of representation to serve as an advocate for their rights. Some believed that the lack of a union enabled the factory to get away with poor working conditions.

"If there were a union, things would be fairer for us," one 32-year-old woman from Henan Province told the NYT. "Right now, one person says one thing, another complains about another, and the boss doesn't listen to anything."

The news report said plainclothes security agents were stationed outside the factory and that the police had been called when a foreigner began taking photographs of the strike.

Liu Kaiming, founder and executive director of the Institute of Contemporary Observation in Shenzhen, was quoted as saying: "The migrant workers have learned to protest with their feet. They are more capable of negotiating, and they can choose not to work." He said that the situation had especially been true recently, with a lot of migrant workers of the generation born in the 1980s entering the workforce. "They’ve had a better education, they’re young and emotional, and they’ve been emboldened by media reports to demand their rights," he continued.

Asked if they were afraid of losing their jobs by pressing their demands for shorter work hours and enforcement of minimum-wage laws, the workers scoffed at the idea and said workers were in short supply in Shenzhen's factories.

In the words of one woman: "If we were men, there would have been a strike a long time ago. Women are easier to bully, but we have hearts of steel."

Source: New York Times