· May, 2009

Stories about Labor from May, 2009

Go Farm, Young Man! – How Farming in Japan is Changing

  31 May 2009

For a country that identifies strongly as being historically agricultural people, the landscape of Japan's agricultural sector is bleak, and has been for some time. Simply put, the workforce is rapidly aging and there aren't nearly enough successors. The price of rice has gone down, and structural reform is unlikely...

Japan: Nova under G-Education

  28 May 2009

Koichi gives us a rare glimpse of life after the collapse of giant English school Nova at ‘Post-Nova Bust: How is G-Education for teaching English in Japan?‘. [en] His blog post is an interview with a teacher who worked for both Nova and G-Education, the company that bought them out.

Israel: Bloggers Back the Struggle for Workers’ Rights

One of the issues Israeli bloggers truly care about and campaign for is workers' rights. At present, two topics are stirring up the Hebrew blogosphere: supporting the academic staff of the Open University that has been on strike for five weeks and counting, and boycotting AMPM drugstores (the "seven eleven" of Tel Aviv) for their workers' rights infringements.

Bahrain: Our Need For Indians Is Like Our Need For Air

Earlier this month, Bahrain announced that it would be ending the system of sponsorship of foreign labour. While the move is intended to stop the exploitation of workers, especially from the Indian subcontinent, for some Bahrainis the idea of it becoming easier for foreigners to work in the country is worrying. In this post a blogger talks about the Indian presence in Bahrain.

Haiti: Minimum Wage Increase

  19 May 2009

Wadner Pierre says that “Haitian labor activists applauded the Preval administration's decision to raise the minimum wage in Haiti from 70 to 200 gourdes ($5.50 USD) per day”, but notes that “the increase has been strongly opposed by Haitian industrialists.”

China: Netizens stand with the waitress who killed an official

  17 May 2009

Deng Yujiao, a waitress in Hubei Province stabbed an official to death and injured another in resisting their sexual advances. Comments on the internet showed no sympathy with the dead official and generally support the 21-year-old girl, acclaiming that she is another Yang Jia who acted in response to an...

Russia: Translation of Baymurat Story

Jost A Mon translates Roman Gruzov's Bolshoi Gorod text (RUS) about Baymurat, “an unlikely star” of the Russian internet, mentioned on GV back in April – here: “… a poorly dressed Tajik gastarbeiter who brilliantly performed the song ‘Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Aaja’ from the Hindi film ‘Disco Dancer’ with such...

Russia: Visa Application Process

White Sun of the Desert writes about the Russian visa application process: “Then at the beginning of this year they decided that all applications had to come with a notarised translation of every page of your passport, including all visas and stamps therein. I have a 48-page passport with stamps...

Japan: Doctor shortage, the medical system in crisis

  6 May 2009

Together with the economic crisis the shortage of doctors (医師不足, ishi busoku in Japanese) is becoming more and more urgent in Japan. As a Fire and Disaster Management Agency survey pointed out in 2007, the causes are the uneven distribution of the doctors mainly settled in urban areas and the...

Cuba: May Day

  4 May 2009

As Havana Times blogs about the traditions of May Day in Cuba, complete with photos of the festivities, Generation Y does something non-traditional: “The limited drumming arose from the smallness of the individual who dared, and not from the massive automatism of those who paraded in the morning..in spite of...

Japan: On Takiji's “Cannery Ship”

  2 May 2009

‘The “Boom” was Manufactured and Real’ – ikjeld.com offers an online edition of Norma Field's “Commercial Appetite and Human Need: The Accidental and Fated Revival of Kobayashi Takiji's Cannery Ship” (published in the Asia-Pacific Journal) on how and why Takiji's pillar of Japanese proletarian literature hit it off with the...

Cuba: May Day and Name Calling

  1 May 2009

Havana Times and Along the Malecon blog about different aspects of Cuba's May Day celebrations, while The Cuban Triangle notes that “the Obama Administration designated Cuba a ‘state sponsor of terrorism'…and Cuba responded by calling the United States an ‘international criminal.’ So we’re even.”