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WeChat post about 70 per cent pay cut by employee of Shanghai Pudong Development Bank unit sparks protest over salaries against lender’s IT vendor
- Protests made headlines because millions of Chinese employees are worried about wage incomes and job prospects, consultant says
- SPDB says employees and the outsourced IT firm are in talks to find common ground
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Dozens of employees protested against a vendor providing information-technology (IT) services to Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (SPDB) on Thursday afternoon after they had a disagreement with the company over salaries and benefits, a rare strike in mainland China that has gone viral amid mounting concerns about a slumbering economy among the public.
The incident took place after an employee with the bank’s wealth-management subsidiary complained about a nearly 70 per cent pay cut. A screenshot of a post by the employee on WeChat was widely circulated on the Chinese social-media platform and touched a nerve with the IT vendor’s staff, who took up their own grievances.
“A strike and heavy salary cuts by a bank easily made headlines, because millions of Chinese employees are now unnerved by worries about wage incomes and job prospects,” said Ding Haifeng, a consultant at Shanghai-based financial advisory firm Integrity. “The protest, though on a small scale, will also sound an alarm among the country’s public security authorities, because they treat it as a threat to social stability.”
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