labor - Emerging call for real trade unions

Howard French of the New York Times reports about a strike in Shenzhen at the factory of a supplier of Wal-Mart, as evidence that labor relations in China do need a different approach. In the Sino-Japanese joint venture, where wireless phonese are being made, 12,000 workers walked out on Friday.
"The hordes of young women employed here say they are required to work 11-hour days, including three hours of mandatory overtime, in order to earn a basic monthly salary of 484 yuan, or about US$58. The women say they must spend nearly half their wage on the drab company dormitories where, as migrants, they must live," the article reprinted in the IHT says.
While the women are not organized in a union, contacts have improved and the article identifies SMS-messages as the main way to communicate.
"The migrant workers have learned to protest with their feet, they are more capable of negotiating, and they can choose not to work," said Liu Kaiming, who studies conditions of migrant workers in Guangdong Province in the article. "That has especially been true recently, with a lot of the migrant workers who were 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 about their conditions to demand their rights."
(I have waited a day so I could provide a link to the article in the IHT, in stead of the NYT that would disappear behind a firewall after a week - FT)