Mijon posted a story from the IHT yesterday about Zhang Shihe, a blogger who for the last year and a half has been raising awareness of the plight of his neighbourhood's homeless, many of whom are migrants from the countryside. The blog mentioned can be found here (in Chinese only).

Modernity has come to the aid of homeless people of Qianmen in the somewhat unlikely figure of Zhang Shihe, a 55-year-old blogger. For the last year and a half he has used the Internet to raise awareness of the plight of the neighbourhood's homeless, many of which are migrants from the countryside. Zhang started blogging 5 years ago to publicize injustices he witnessed on Beijing's back streets or in China's countryside. He recruited help from 10 web-savvy volunteers and solicited donations on his blog and is careful with his postings as some have already been caught by the Web censors. Zhang keeps his residents focused on the goal of sustainability. Instead of encouraging hawkers to leave the steets, volunteers are buying them carts so they can sell more goods. Full story here.

As many as 800,000 workers are vulnerable to retrenchment due to the downturn. These include workers in export-oriented industries as well as Filipinos employed abroad. In October, government data showed unemployment at 2.53 million, while those underemployed, or whose jobs do not fit their education or skills, numbered about six million. Others estimate unemployment and underemployment at above 10 million, possibly hitting 11 million this year. With the global financial crisis wreaking havoc on local employment, addressing basic labour issues such as providing decent work has become more difficult to achieve, potentially undermining the Millennium Development Goal of eradicating poverty and hunger. About 25.4 million Filipinos are estimated to be living below the poverty line of $1.35/day, roughly one in three, while the MDG-1 target aims to halve the number of Filipinos living in extreme poverty - 12.7 million - by 2015. As I have argued before, now is the time that CSR has never been so important with community investment programmes targeted at poverty alleviation a top priority. This is one reason why we are holding The Manila Forum event this year with a special emphasis on community invesment.

The current economic crisis is likely to affect workers in different ways including declining hours of work, or an increase in part-time work, pressure for lower wages and less job security. This article asks whether good quality jobs are being created, jobs that pay a decent wage, allowing workers and their families to escape poverty, and jobs that allow economies to move to higher value production. The Philippines, still has a large share of workers in vulnerable employment with an estimated 60 percent of the workforce living with their families in extreme poverty.