News from RISI – Employees of Gold East Paper and Henan Yinge Industrial Investment in China have recently carried out significant strikes.
On 15 October, hundreds of female staff working in paper-sorting gathered at the gate of Gold East Paper’s sole mill protesting its salary adjustment scheme.
Gold East, a subsidiary of APP China, runs the mill housing three big coated fine paper PMs with a total capacity of 2.6 million tpy. It is located at Zhenjiang city, Jiangsu province.
The protesting workers claimed that they did not get salary increases, while other workers did.
The demonstration forced the mill to suspend production, but all PMs restarted later that week.
For its part, a spokesperson for APP China explained that employee wages at Gold East Paper are above the local average in Jiangsu, and that the firm’s mills comply with all labour and salary rules and regulations.
The spokesperson claimed the company is working with employees to find an acceptable solution to the dispute.
Henan Yinge redundancies:
Another strike earlier this month was carried out by staff at a Henan Yinge mill. It was reported that almost 1,000 workers went onto the streets protesting the firm’s repositioning scheme for redundant personnel.
The firm, based in Luohe city, Henan province, has long been a major P&P player regionally.
It has a combined capacity of around 900,000tpy of pulp and paper grades at several sites in Henan and Sichuan provinces.
The employees on strike were from a mill in Luohe city. The plant, founded in 1967, used to be a major straw pulp maker in China.
It has a combined capacity of around 100,000tpy of straw pulp and 220,000tpy of uncoated printing and writing paper.
Workers complained to the media that they face losing their jobs, as several PMs at the mill have stopped production. However, the repositioning scheme proposed by the firm was not at all satisfying to them. Henan Yinge declined to comment on the strike.
In Luohe, the firm operates another three sites with a combined capacity of around 360,000 tpy of packaging paper and board, 120,000 tpy of tissue, and 70,000 tpy of specialty paper.
Elsewhere in Luzhou city, Sichuan province, the company has a 130,000tpy P&P mill.
In 2013, Luohe Yinge shut down a 100,000tpy P&P facility located in Luohe’s Wuyang county and the equipment at the site was listed on China’s 2013 mandatory obsolete P&P machine closure campaign.
According to the firm, it will receive more than RMB 322 million ($52.4 million) as compensation from local authorities for the shutdown.
The listed firm has been losing money, and recorded a huge loss of RMB 279 million in 2013.
