David Moser meets two guests to discuss China's labor conditions, and the reasons behind a spate of suicides at the Shenzhen company, Foxconn.

It has been a tough year so far for Foxconn. With 12 employee suicides and the latest news of significant first half losses, 2009 is shaping up to be a year the company would likely want to forget. Hoping to leave this past behind, the company now has plans to shift its coastal operations inland. BON’s Kelda Yuen has more on Foxconn’s next move and what the decision means for the company and its workers.

Experts here say the Honda factory strikes could just be the tip of the iceberg as China's workforce make greater demands for decent wages and working hours. That's right.

Analysts say that younger factory workers - having grown up in a time of relative prosperity - will find it increasingly difficult to accept low pay and grueling work hours the way previous generations have. China's rapidly aging population also is expected to boost labor's leverage as the number of working-age Chinese dwindles to about half its current portion of the population by 2030.

There are labor shortages in many export-driven coastal provinces because of rapid development in China's interior. And several provinces and major cities like Shanghai have had little choice but to raise minimum wages. And the Honda strike appears to have worked – the workers have been offered a 24 percent pay rise that would bring monthly salaries to about $281. So is striking the answer? Is downing tools and refusing to work the best way to improve working conditions? Or are there more constructive ways to improve things in the workplace? That's a question we put to people in today's Straight from the Street.

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As spring has turned to summer here in China, problems between workers and management at multinational corporations in the south of the country have started to heat up.

First a string of suicides at their factories brought Foxconn, the country's largest contract electronics manufacturer, to its knees.

Then a strike by workers at a Honda transmission assembly plant brought work at all four of the company's factories in China to a halt.

To try to get a sense of what these incidents mean and where things may be heading, we have on the line Geoffrey Crothall from the Hong Kong-based NGO China Labour Bulletin, which seeks to defend and promote the rights of workers in China.

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The city of Shenzhen in southern China is one of China's key centers for light manufacturing. It's in this city, just across the border from Hong Kong, that major high-tech companies, both Chinese and foreign, manufacture the electronic products that consumers the world over clamor for. But in recent months the city's biggest employer has hit the headlines for quite another reason - the disturbing number of suicides amongst its young workforce.