At the end of every year, we see an upsurge in migrant construction workers’ demands for wages in arrears. This year, the credit squeeze has meant the surge has come earlier. In the past week alone, the official Chinese media has reported over eight wage arrears cases, involving over 2,000 workers. Many workers didn’t get their money, worse still; many got badly beaten by thugs hired by their bosses. Now, a few “clever” migrant workers have started to take advantage of the public sympathy for their plight, and government policies to maintain social stability, in order to exhort additional pay from their bosses.

Following the closure of 24 migrant schools in Beijing earlier this year, many parents had no option but to send their children back to their hometowns. Those students who could find places in the public school system often had to endure discrimination and were made to feel inferior to their local classmates.

Li Jinxiong has a mission; to improve safety and reduce accidents in China’s electricity supply grid. The former grid safety inspector from the south-eastern province of Fujian claims that the situation in the electricity supply sector is just as bad as in China’s notoriously dangerous coal mines. However, he says, no one is paying attention.

While extremely low pay and lack of career development opportunities could explain why temporary workers are more likely to make professional mistakes, what concerns netizens the most is when companies use them as scapegoats to help them save face and shrug off any possible responsibilities.

Apart from the issue of how the local labour bureau in Haikou failed to spot a factory with more than 1,000 employees paying less than the minimum wage for years on end, a more pressing question is whether or not this factory could stay profitable if it did abide by the local minimum wage standard.

It is very unusual to see the word strike (罢工) in the mainstream media in China. Most official publications prefer the less sensitive term “work stoppage” (停工) but China’s netizens are not so shy. Indeed, many netizens are the first to report strikes and worker protests, such as the strike by railway workers in Changsha, which was photographed and uploaded by a lawyer passing through the train station where the drivers were gathered.

In late May, Xiong Hanjiang, a 19-year-old migrant worker from Sichuan visited his township labour bureau in the hope that officials there would help him get his two-month’s salary back from his employer, Hua Yi Porcelain. The bureau did in fact order the factory to give Xiong his 3,400 yuan salary but the boss refused to pay. When Xiong and his parents demanded payment, the boss and his family started to beat them and Xiong’s hamstrings were severed, leaving him possibly paralyzed for the rest of his life.

After two migrant workers riots in Guangdong early June, and apparently at the behest of Guangdong Party Secretary, Wang Yang, the province plans to honour its migrant workers by building a museum - the first official museum of its kind in China – showcasing their immeasurable contribution to the development and modernization of Guangdong.

Nepotism has been around probably as long as the Chinese civil service itself. Even today, many officials consider it to be “common sense” that, given that they have been serving at the government for a long period of time, their relatives “deserve to be taken good care of as compensation for their hard work.”

In late April, some 450,000 catering workers in Wuhan welcomed the signing of a collective agreement that promised them a basic wage 30 percent higher than the municipal minimum wage (currently 900 yuan), and a wage increase this year of at least nine percent on average.

 

But soon after the Labour Day celebrations died down, experts started questioning if this agreement is really that promising, even though it does involves the largest number of workers covered in one agreement and a big increase in pay.