South China's Guangdong Province, home to millions of
farmers turned industrial workers, will keep taking employers to
task for violating labor laws.
The system was devised to protect workers' rights and make
employers follow labor laws. And it appears to be paying off
employers paid 1.84 billion yuan ($236 million) in wage arrears to
more than 1 million workers last year.
"The special system, implemented at the end of 2005, has helped
check the number of employers not paying their staff," Zhang
Fengqi, deputy director of the Guangdong Provincial Department of
Labor and Social Security, said yesterday.
A total of 95 companies had been "blacklisted" for serious
violation of labor laws and defaulting on wages by the end of last
year, Zhang said.
"Any employer found violating labor laws will be exposed through
the media, including the Internet, and some public work
institutions We are keeping a close eye on employers, and that
helped the number of payment default cases to drop last year."
The Guangdong labor authority detected 21,900 cases of payment
defaults last year, down by 11.6 percent over 2005.
Guangdong, as one of China's economic powerhouses, has attracted
thousands of migrant workers from other provinces and regions over
the past two decades, with their present number being more than 21
million, provincial labor authority sources said.
Months of waiting
Many such workers have had to wait for months for their wages,
or have been forced to work for more than 10 hours a day because of
lack of legal support, Zhang said.
In November, the labor authority began working with the public
security department, to begin another province-wide exposure
campaign against defaulting employers, he said. The campaign, to
last until February, helped reclaim more than 70 million yuan
(US$8.97 million) by January 10.
"Employees who fail to pay the due wages to their workers face
serious punishment. We urge workers to report if they don't get
pays," Zhang said.
(China Daily January 31, 2007)