You knew it would happen some day — the wages for workers in China are on the rise.

For years now, U.S. companies have been running to China to take advantage of the low wages, but now the poor and taken-advantage of over there are asking for more.

Check out a front page story in the New York Times today on the topic.

While workers are still making a substandard wage there, less than $300 a month for some jobs, it’s more than it was just a few years ago.

“For decades, many labor economists said that China’s vast population would supply a nearly bottomless pool of workers.” the article states. “So many people would be seeking jobs at any given time, this reasoning went, that wages in this country would be stuck just above subsistene levels. As recently as four years ago, some experts estimated that most of the perhaps 150 million underemployed workers in the countryside would be heading to cities.

“Instead, sporadic labor shortages started to appear in 2003 at factories in the Pearl River delta of southeastern China. Now those shortages have speard to factories up and down the Chinese coast.”

While wages in China have a long way up to go before U.S. companies start running back to their homeland, it’s a sign that you can’t take advantage of workers forever.