Guangdong Labour and Social Security Bureau openly condemned 20 "sweatshops" in the province on 22 September, according to a mainland Chinese business newspaper.

These factories generally had broken China's Labour Law, including overtime working, wage arrears and employing child workers aged below 16. The local authorities announced the list of "sweatshops" and their bad deeds through the media and posted the list at recruitment centres across the province to remind jobseekers about these "sweatshops".

Among the first batch of "sweatshops" opened criticized by the Guangdong Labour and Social Security Bureau, 14 of them are located in the Pearl River Delta - mostly in the construction, textile and electronics industries in cities with high labour demand, including Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Zhongshan and Huizhou.

This is the first time in country for government agencies to openly condemn "sweatshops", according to the First Finance and Economics Daily. The Guangdong Labour and Social Security Bureau would start disclosing "sweatshops" from 1 October through relevant government websites, recruitment centres and the media.

Reporters of the newspaper had tried to contact those 20 "sweatshops" picked by the Guangdong authorities, but they discovered that the people in charge of these factories had escaped and there were no answers from the factories’ registered telephone numbers.

The report listed out the bad deeds of some of these "sweatshops": an electronics factory in Shenzhen forced its 116 workers to work 123.44 hours more than the legal limit; a shoe factory in Foshan owed its workers 4.8 million Yuan of back pay; workers at a massage parlour in Zhuhai staged a strike and petitioned to the local government after their employer illegally confiscated their identity cards and snatched their deposits; an electronics factory in Huizhou was found to have employed child workers.

Sources: First Financial Daily (23 September 2005), Mingpao (24 September 2005)