Beijing migrant workers win fight for unpaid wages after sleeping in underpass
A group of migrant building workers, who slept in an underpass near a government building in Beijing for three nights to protest against unpaid wages, have received or been promised their cash.
One of the workers said they had been in dispute for three months and it was only the publicity generated by the media that had forced their employer’s hand.
“The media coverage helped us a great deal,” said one of the workers from Hebei province neighbouring Beijing. “
“We’ve tried the labour bureau, the district government and the bureau for letters and calls, but none of them would help us. ‘You go ahead to court’ was all they had to say to us,” he said.
About 80 workers from Shandong, Hebei, Henan and Gansu provinces in China were involved in the dispute.
They worked on a construction site for a gated community in the Chaoyang district of the capital from March to September, but the contractor refused to pay them their salaries after the project was completed due to an alleged shortage of funds.
The boss owed each worker between 10,000 yuan (HK$12,600) and 30,000 yuan.
After repeated requests for help from the government fell on deaf ears, the workers gathered in front of the Chaoyang district government office last Monday and spent three nights there in an attempt to attract attention to their plight.
They were driven off by the police last Thursday.
“They didn’t let us sleep outside the government building, saying we will affect the image of the city and they threatened to take us away if we didn’t comply. So we all went to the underpass,” the worker said.
The news website youth.cn, run by the Central Committee of the Communist Young League, published a report about the workers on Saturday evening, which was widely used on news websites in China and shared on social media.
The workers’ boss appeared in the underpass in the early hours on Sunday morning and handed salaries to some of the workers.
He then took the others to a dormitory building he owned and promised to pay them back before the end of the month.
The worker from Hebei said that about 60 to 70 workers were at the meeting.
Another worker from Anhui province said he received more than 10,000 yuan on Sunday and had already returned to his hometown.
“No matter what, the news story has helped us solve the problem,” he said.
