All of a sudden China’s overseas workers are headline news. The official Chinese media and the Internet have been flooded with expressions of concern and outrage at the abduction of 29 Chinese road workers in Sudan. While some bloggers are demanding commando raids to rescue the workers, the Global Times took a rather more measured approach, urging Chinese embassies to do more to protect Chinese nationals, and for individuals to be more safety conscious when working overseas.

Apple’s 2012 Supplier Responsibility Report has launched a discussion on the abuses in Apple’s supply chain, and how to go about remedying it. In many ways, the discussion is great because it interjects the all too hidden topic of Chinese working conditions into the mainstream. But at the same time, the challenge is to figure out how to improve conditions at Apple’s suppliers so that Chinese workers and Chinese society benefit in the long run.

When Apple, one of the world’s most secretive companies, was winning plaudits for finally revealing the names of its supplier companies in its 2012 Supplier Responsibility Progress Report last Friday, one small detail seems to have been overlooked.

Despite a sharp fall in the number of job openings in the southern metropolis of Shenzhen, migrant workers at still showing up at the city’s job fairs confident of finding employment in a city where there is a significant under-supply of labour.

Despite the growing interest of college students in social work and the relatively high salary of this profession, a Guangdong-based social worker service centre said they still have difficulty finding professional social workers. In Guangzhou alone, the shortfall in social workers will reportedly be 6,000 next year.

Although many scholars are pessimistic about the workers’ demands because they lack a clear legal base, some labor rights lawyers say no matter what the final outcome of this merger is, PepsiCo workers’ collective movement will surely have a profound impact on other foreign merger cases in China. Moreover, they point out that the lack of an effective collective bargaining mechanism in enterprises makes the situation for both workers and management more difficult to resolve.

There are about 119 million people in China aged 65-years or older, that is 8.9 percent of the total population. According to official estimates, only one quarter of them have a pension. And even those who do have a pension usually cannot rely on it for a sufficient income. The vast majority of China’s elderly depend on their children for support or have to find part-time work to get by. And women are significantly worse off than men.

The notice issued by the Ministry of Education in late November ordering universities to cut enrolment for majors that have a less than 60 percent employment rate for two consecutive years is just another example of how Chinese higher education is becoming more and more utilitarian.

A new research report published by Human Rights Watch this month documents a wide-range of labour abuses including anti-union activities but focuses primarily on safety issues. And here, for anyone remotely familiar with the working conditions and management practices in Chinese mines, an all-too-familiar picture emerges.

At the end of every year, we see an upsurge in migrant construction workers’ demands for wages in arrears. This year, the credit squeeze has meant the surge has come earlier. In the past week alone, the official Chinese media has reported over eight wage arrears cases, involving over 2,000 workers. Many workers didn’t get their money, worse still; many got badly beaten by thugs hired by their bosses. Now, a few “clever” migrant workers have started to take advantage of the public sympathy for their plight, and government policies to maintain social stability, in order to exhort additional pay from their bosses.