Yang Zhengjun (杨郑君)

Yang Zhengjun (杨郑君) is a labour rights defender from Chongqing city in southwest China. While studying at a university in Beijing, Yang Zhengjun joined students from across China in travelling to the countryside to support rural communities and conduct research into their living and working conditions. During the first year of his graduate studies in 2008, Yang Zhengjun initiated the ‘Students Coca-Cola Concern Group’, which investigated the labour conditions of factories and suppliers in China for Coca-Cola and published a report detailing the company’s exploitative use of dispatch contract workers. The report urged Coca-Cola to comply with the provisions of China’s Labour Contract Law and improve the working conditions of dispatch contract workers. In 2010, after a series of suicides of workers at a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, Yang Zhengjun and a group of university students went to Shenzhen to investigate the working conditions at Foxconn. In 2013, he co-founded the independent online labour rights news and advocacy platform iLabour (“Xinshengdai” in Chinese). As co-editor of the iLabour platform, Yang Zhengjun helped publish articles about labour rights under Chinese law, incidents of labour rights violations, and workers’ own experiences in labour rights advocacy. iLabour also provided labour rights consultations for workers on how to submit petitions to government officials and claim their rights under Chinese labour law and regulations.