Here are some key points from the article (which was correctly submitted with its original title, reflecting the view of the author):

"While there are no official statistics, it is certain that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of strikes take place each year. All of them are wildcat strikes – there is no such thing as a legal strike in China.

. . . .

"Workers have been asking for wage increases above and beyond those to which they are legally entitled, and in many strikes they have begun to demand that they elect their own union representatives. They have not called for independent unions outside of the official All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), as this would surely incite violent state repression. But the insistence on elections represents the germination of political demands, even if the demand is only organized at the company level."

I have been reading the government-controlled mass media from China in English since 1975 and in the original Chinese since 1979. Chinese media sources are very wary of reporting on the genuine condition of working people in China. As the article kindly submitted here reports, and as can even be confirmed from the official media in China, there are thousands of instances of local unrest each year in China. (A category for "China unrest" stories I have set on Google News regularly turns up new cases reported by many different media sources.)

Progress in standard of living and even in day-by-day freedom for the masses has been real in my lifetime, and rather steady since the repression after the Tian'anmen Square Massacre relaxed, but the common people of China still mostly live in conditions that were unacceptable in neighboring countries decades ago. The test of China's development in the next decade will be whether political reform can at length catch up with having multiparty democracy and free and fair local elections--something Taiwan had in the 1950s. If government censorship of the mass media ends in China, as it ended in Taiwan more than twenty years ago, then maybe China can have an honest internal debate about how to continue progress for the masses. If it has that honest debate, one likely suggestion is to have free and fair elections at the national level, so that there is an actual chance of a peaceful transfer of power from the Communist Party of China.

AFTER EDIT: The first kind reply to my comment asks how likely (peaceful) change in the direction of democratization and press freedom is in China, and my answer is that I am not sure. I remember a conversation with a friend in 1985 who was sure that the Soviet Union would still exist, with the Communist Party still in charge, well into the twenty-first century. I can remember a different friend telling me in 1989 that she knew of an ethnic church somewhere in the United States where people prayed daily for the freedom on Czechoslovakia--which happened just months after I had that conversation. Taiwan's transition to press freedom and free and fair elections was surprising peaceful, and already happened quite a while ago. China's government has been second to none in studying every example all over the world of dictatorships clinging to power, but social scientists in China are mostly very aware of how suddenly Hungary's and East Germany's and Romania's and Yugoslavia's dictators fell from power when that was least expected. I know from long acquaintance with Chinese people inside and outside China that Chinese people aspire for freedom just like most people in the modern world. I wish them the best in gaining a peaceful rather than a violent transition to more freedom.