'Unionists worried about low wages'

Every day, when times allows, I scan hundreds of entries of different media and search engines to get a fast overview of the subjects I'm working on.
One of those subjects is the combination of China and wages, since at Chinabiz we hope to launch in 2006 the China-section of the global wage indicator. So, when today the communist news paper the People's Daily produced a headline telling the 'unionists' were worried about low wages, I thought my search engine had made a mistake and picked up an article about Northern Ireland, where 'Unionists' is another word for the protestant community.
China does have a trade union, but only one and if they do anything, they organize an annual outing for the employees. The Chinese trade union being worried about something like low wages seemed very odd, to put it midly.
But when I had a closer look at the whole article, I saw that the Chinese media had provided me with my weekly surprise: the Chinese trade unions were indeed worried about low wages. In the past few months the national economic survey, held at the end of last year and bit by bit released, had already captured the headlines before. Last week China changed its official GDP upwards with 17 percent as a consequence of that survey.
Before that Chinese media had already prepared us for a doubling of the official number of urban employees. While wages in China would have been part of that survey, I had not seen any references to that yet. Until today.
The results are not that surprising: migrant workers tend to earn pretty little, even in the prosperous Guangdong province an average of 700 Renminbi per month (USD 85) is noted, if they get paid at all. Income went only up marginally in the past years, at best to comply with the very low minimum wages. Workers in state-owned companies get about double that salary. A senior trade union official called Dong gave a rare interview about this situation:

Citing that China's economy has achieved annual average growth of 9.4 per cent in the past 27 years, Dong said the slow rate in pay increase means that workers are losing out in the chance to benefit from the country's development.

And:

Wang Zhaoguo, chairman of the federation, said 1.17 million grass-roots trade unions will be organized to bring workers and the management together to negotiate a possible increase in wages. Those are

strange sounds, and most likely only propaganda. But there is certainly domestic political pressure on the official Chinese trade union to do what they are paid for: protest the interests of workers. Very interesting.