China Employment Law Update - February 2010

[Excerpt] At the start of the new year, Shenzhen authorities announced that in 2010 they will pick 120 companies from the Global Fortune 500 and China Fortune 500 that have operations in Shenzhen, and push for collective bargaining within these companies. The focus will be on setting minimum wage standards and guaranteed wage increases within the companies. On January 18, a draft set of collective bargaining regulations was submitted to the Shenzhen People’s Congress for review. Most significantly, these draft regulations provide that if an impasse occurs in the collective bargaining process and cannot be resolved by the parties amicably, either party may apply for binding labor arbitration on the issues causing the impasse and the arbitration panel must decide on the issue within 15 days of receiving the application. This is similar to what unions in the US are pushing for in the Employee Free Choice Act. Other significant provisions provide that companies with more than 300 employees must sign collective contracts with employees. Because Shenzhen is often at the forefront of legislative developments in China, if the draft regulations are passed in their current form, it is likely that local governments in other major cities and provinces may follow Shenzhen’s lead and adopt similar measures

Origin of Fe3+ in Fe-containing, Al-free Mantle Silicate Perovskite

We have studied the ferrous (Fe2+) and ferric (Fe3+) iron concentrations in Al-free Fe containing Mg-silicate perovskite (Mg-Pv) at pressure (P), temperature (T), and oxygen fugacity (fO2) conditions related to the lower mantle using a thermodynamic model based on ab-initio calculations. We consider the oxidation reaction and the charge disproportionation reaction, both of which can produce Fe3+ in Mg-Pv. The model shows qualitatively good agreement with available experimental data on Fe3+/{\Sigma}Fe ({\Sigma}Fe = total Fe in system), spin transitions, and equations of state. We predict that under lower-mantle conditions Fe3+/{\Sigma}Fe determined by the charge disproportionation is estimated to be 0.01-0.07 in Al-free Mg-Pv, suggesting that low Al Mg-Pv in the uppermost pyrolitic mantle (where majoritic garnet contains most of the Al) and in the harzburgitic heterogeneities throughout the lower mantle contains very little Fe3+. We find that the volume reduction by the spin transition of the B-site Fe3+ leads to a minimum Fe3+/{\Sigma}Fe in Mg-Pv at mid-mantle pressures. The model shows that configurational entropy is a key driving force to create Fe3+ and therefore Fe3+ content is highly temperature sensitive. The temperature sensitivity may lead to a maximum Fe3+/{\Sigma}Fe in Mg-Pv in warm regions at the core-mantle boundary region, such as Large Low Shear Velocity Provinces (LLSVPs), potentially altering the physical (e.g., bulk modulus) and transport (e.g., thermal and electrical conductivities) properties of the heterogeneities

Shenzhen Workers Strike Again

This document is part of a digital collection provided by the Martin P. Catherwood Library, ILR School, Cornell University, pertaining to the effects of globalization on the workplace worldwide. Special emphasis is placed on labor rights, working conditions, labor market changes, and union organizing.CLW_2011_Report_China_Shenzhen_workers.pdf: 14 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Domination of World’s Leading Retailer- Wal-Mart, “Save Money, Live better”; Workers’ nightmare

The report describes living and working conditions at the Hantai Shoe factory in Shenzhen City, China, a Walmart supplier

Nanoscale Voltage Enhancement at Cathode Interfaces in Li-ion Batteries

Interfaces are ubiquitous in Li-ion battery electrodes, occurring across compositional gradients, regions of multiphase intergrowths, and between electrodes and solid electrolyte interphases or protective coatings. However, the impact of these interfaces on Li energetics remains largely unknown. In this work, we calculated Li intercalation-site energetics across cathode interfaces and demonstrated the physics governing these energetics on both sides of the interface. We studied the olivine/olivine-structured LixFePO4/LixMPO4 (x=0 and 1, M=Co, Ti, Mn) and layered/layered-structured LiNiO2/TiO2 interfaces to explore different material structures and transition metal elements. We found that across an interface from a high- to low-voltage material the Li voltage remains constant in the high-voltage material and decays approximately linearly in the low-voltage region, approaching the Li voltage of the low-voltage material. This effect ranges from 0.5-9nm depending on the interfacial dipole screening. This effect provides a mechanism for a high-voltage material at an interface to significantly enhance the Li intercalation voltage in a low-voltage material over nanometer scale. We showed that this voltage enhancement is governed by a combination of electron transfer (from low- to high-voltage regions), strain and interfacial dipole screening. We explored the implications of this voltage enhancement for a novel heterostructured-cathode design and redox pseudocapacitors

Made in China: The Sweatshop Behind the Bratz

The report describes living and working conditions at the Hua Tai 4k factory in Shenzhen City, China. It is part of the large Hua Cheng group and supplies Bratz dolls mostly for California-based MGA Entertainment Company

The Use of Value Capture for Transport Projects in China: Opportunities and Challenges

Value capture (VC) could be a useful tool to address the huge demand for public transport infrastructure funding in China. This research identifies the opportunities and challenges faced by VC implementation in China and explains how local governments and local transit agencies dealt with the regulatory barriers. The findings of this research offer insights including: (1) macro environment, regulatory framework, and supportive policy environment provide opportunities to adopt VC projects, while the risk of acquiring land vale cannot be isolated from the global political and economic situations; (2) the regulatory challenges of land transactions and lack of property tax system restrict the application of VC; (3) evidence from the case study of Shenzhen demonstrates that local government may creatively deal with the regulatory challenges to do VC and benefit local community; (4) institutional capacity is vital to implement VC. The analysis of Shenzhen experience can provide a reference for other Chinese cities to implement VC.fals

ShenZhen transportation system (SZTS): a novel big data benchmark suite

Data analytics is at the core of the supply chain for both products and services in modern economies and societies. Big data workloads, however, are placing unprecedented demands on computing technologies, calling for a deep understanding and characterization of these emerging workloads. In this paper, we propose ShenZhen Transportation System (SZTS), a novel big data Hadoop benchmark suite comprised of real-life transportation analysis applications with real-life input data sets from Shenzhen in China. SZTS uniquely focuses on a specific and real-life application domain whereas other existing Hadoop benchmark suites, such as HiBench and CloudRank-D, consist of generic algorithms with synthetic inputs. We perform a cross-layer workload characterization at the microarchitecture level, the operating system (OS) level, and the job level, revealing unique characteristics of SZTS compared to existing Hadoop benchmarks as well as general-purpose multi-core PARSEC benchmarks. We also study the sensitivity of workload behavior with respect to input data size, and we propose a methodology for identifying representative input data sets