Unpaid wages still haunt migrant workers, according to two surveys.

A quarter of the 3,288 migrant workers surveyed said they had not been paid their full wages, according to a survey released yesterday by the National Economic Research Institute under the China Reform Foundation.

In 2004 alone, unpaid wages totaled an estimated 20 billion yuan (US$2.5 billion), Wang Xiaolu, deputy director of the institute, said. Over the last few years, China had about 100 billion yuan (US$12.5 billion) in unpaid wages.

Statistics from the Ministry of Labor and Social Security indicate there are 120 million rural migrant workers nationwide, more than 80 per cent of them working in cities. Most are male laborers under 40 from central and western parts of the country, working in the construction and manufacturing sectors.

An expert panel of the Ministry of Labor and Social Security released a similar report on Sunday.

Citing Beijing as an example, it said that up to 3 billion yuan (US$375 million) was still owing to 700,000 rural migrant laborers working on construction sites last year.

Early last year, the country introduced a series of measures relating to employment and payment to safeguard the rights and interests of rural migrant workers.

Last December, the Ministry of Construction announced that more than 98 per cent of the 33.6 billion yuan (US$4.2 billion) owing in unpaid wages had been settled.

"It is up to the governments to address the problem," Jiang Zhongyi, an expert with the Research Centre for Rural Economy, a think tank under the Ministry of Agriculture, said.

The think tank's report also says many employers deliberately withhold wages from their employees.

An investigation by the National Bureau of Statistics last year discovered some companies take 20 to 30 per cent of staff's wages as a "deposit." But the "deposit" was rarely paid back.

The survey by Wang's institute says the average per capita annual income for migrant workers reached 9,236 yuan (US$1,140) last year, half of which was remitted to their hometowns.

The money that workers sent home in 2003 accounted for 3.9 per cent of the country's gross domestic product, Wang said.

In addition, among the 3,288 laborers surveyed, 12 per cent said they had become self-employed and 3 per cent now have white-collar jobs, Wang said.

(China Daily August 17, 2005)