100 Shanghai cleaners stage four-day rally over pay cuts as labour protests grow across China
As sanitary workers stopped work, internet censors scrambled to scrub social media clean of photos, videos and comments documenting the industrial action
About 100 street cleaners in Shanghai staged a four-day rally outside a government building last week to protest against pay cuts, amid a rising trend for such shows of public disobedience by workers on China’s mainland.
The rally, at Changning District’s Greening and City Appearance Administration, happened after several street cleaning companies reduced working hours and pay rates, the district government said in a statement on Monday on WeChat, the mainland’s most popular messaging app.
It did not say how many workers had been affected by the cuts or whether the industrial action prompted a change of policy by the companies involved.
Pictures, video footage and comments about the protest were widely shared online, but all had been deleted by internet censors as of Monday. One clip published on Twitter showed security officers forcibly removing one of the protesters from the scene.
上海警方正在抓捕抓捕罢工抗议中的环卫工人。 pic.twitter.com/p0vOFo1RLI— 劳工公益志愿者 (@JiangsongWang) April 1, 2018
“Dozens of workers were protesting against the pay cuts,” a state media source told the South China Morning Post on condition of anonymity as he was not authorised to speak on the matter.
