China exerts law force over migrant workers' overdue payment

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Friday, January 16, 2004

China exerts law force over migrant workers' overdue payment

One week before the Chinese lunar new year, 500 peasants from east China's Anhui Province finally received their wages overdue for about two years.

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One week before the Chinese lunar new year, 500 peasants from east China's Anhui Province finally received their wages overdue for about two years.

"Now I can go home for the spring festival," 31-year-old Qiu Weixing said happily. He and his fellow workers got paid for over four million yuan (about 483,676 US dollars).

Qiu had been in Beijing for three years. He should have gone back home on last spring festival, but without being paid he could not leave Beijing.

Qiu worked in a construction site since November, 2001 to September, 2002, for which he was paid 10,195 yuan (about 1,231 US dollars). "It is three times higher than the total income of a villager at my hometown for one year," he said.

Seventy of Qiu's fellow workers also got their overdue wages on Thursday morning. The rest 429 workers who already left Beijing would be paid through the contractor they were employed. "The overdue payment of migrant workers has aroused unprecedented attention this year and our efforts in solving the problem were also more intensive than ever," Zhang Xingye, deputy head of the Beijing municipal construction bureau told Xinhua.

Statistics show that there are about 30 million peasant workers in China's construction field. To secure the interests of this group, Wang Guangshou has repeatedly requested construction authorities to take concrete measures to ensure the workers' overdue payment in 2003 should be paid before this spring festival.

For the wages in arrears before 2003, Zhang said his bureau has laid out a three-year plan aiming to clear overdue wages of migrant workers working in Beijing's construction sites before 2006. So far, 1.6 billion yuan of overdue wages have been paid, accounting for 53 percent of the total, he said.

Statistics from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed that in 2003, about 85 million Chinese peasants left home for cities, and their average annual income through working away from home was about 700 yuan.

If the 700 yuan were mailed back home by the 85 million migrant workers, the total number could reach 60 billion yuan, about a quarter of Chinese farmers' total income, said the NBS.

Experts from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) estimated that the accumulated overdue payment to the migrant workers in recent years has totaled 100 billion yuan.

Chinese government has ranked the increase of rural income as one major task in 2004, but the recovery of the migrant workers' payment in arrears proved to be very difficult, just like the case of Qiu Weixing.

In November, 2001, Qiu and his 500 fellow workers signed contracts with the Third Construction Company of Maanshan, a local construction company in Anhui Province and worked at a housing construction sites in Beijing for a Beijing housing developer.

In September, 2002, when the project was over, the 500 workers failed to receive their payment as the Beijing developer refused to pay the 5.03 million yuan wages to the Maanshan company. In April, 2003, the Maanshan company raised a law suit against the Beijing housing developer, and finally won the case. But as the Beijing housing developer still refused to pay the workers, a compulsive request for the 5.03 million yuan wages was delivered to the Beijing No. 2 intermediate court on Dec. 5, 2003.

As the result of the compulsive implementation, a total of 4 million yuan has been replevied prior to the Chinese new year, and the rest will be returned after the festival. Zhang Xingye said, the success of the Maanshan case and its successful compulsive implementation, marks an essential step for the legal assistant work in Beijing.

But Zhang said there is still a lot of issues worthy of rethinking, such as the migrant workers' ignorance to legal knowledge.

"I hope the case can tell all migrant workers that law can help them solve their difficulties, and they must learn to protect their legal rights and interests by legal means," said Zhang.

Source: Xinhua

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