Emboldened by the confidence given to them by hosting a successful Olympics, the workers of China are not ready to take their country’s economic nosedive lying down.

In a display of outright defiance - that would have been brutally extinguished in days gone by – workers at a number of factories across China are rising up against the authorities in a protest over continued redundancies and pay cuts.

According to the Associated Press, workers at a toy factory, which makes Nerf toys for U.S. company Hasbro, in the south of the country, trashed the plant after being laid off – a situation that the increasingly concerned Beijing authorities are keen to avoid a repeat of.

“When times are bad economically, a small incident can rapidly become a big one,” a local communist party official was quoted as saying. But while central government continues to urge factories not to lay off staff, the reality of the global financial slowdown – which is leaving many Chinese exports languishing in ports across the country – is starting to bite, and China’s workforce isn’t happy.

The toys are, quite literally, being thrown out of the pram - and the prospect of widespread social unrest is no longer as fanciful a notion as it once seemed.