Beijing government agencies have been asked to strengthen their
supervision mechanisms to prevent migrant workers from being
mistreated, sources from the city's Labor and Social Security
Bureau said Thursday.
Labor and social security departments at district and county level
in the city have been asked to crack down on the deliberate
underpayment of migrant workers.
Flocks of farm workers who have worked for a year in cities will go
home soon to enjoy the Spring Festival with their families.
Li
Yuping, an official with Beijing's Chaoyang District Labor and
Social Security Bureau, said: "Our responsibility is to make sure
that farm workers get paid fairly after a year of hard work."
Some of the bureau's administrative functions have been taken over
by local community committees and village governments to reinforce
the protection of farm workers' rights, Li said.
The bureau has organized classes to train law-enforcement
assistants for village governments and community committees.
Thanks to their efforts, the bureau has received only a few dozen
complaints from farm workers about payment defaults so far this
year, a lot less than in the same period last year.
However, several robberies were carried out by migrant workers last
week and this has aroused the concern of the city's labor and
social-security departments.
It
was reported that several migrant workers broke into the homes of
some Beijing residents to look for money because they had been
underpaid.
Wen Xueguo, a professor of economics with the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences, said: "Prolonged defaults on payment will lead
some workers to go to extremes, which not only threatens the
security of the public but also causes a crisis of credibility.
"Workers should use legal weapons to protect themselves," Wen said.
However, many farm workers are unaware of their legal rights.
A
Sichuan-based 18-year-old farm worker surnamed Zhang said he
and his fellow workers at a building site in Shaoyaoju in Chaoyang
District never thought of submitting their complaints to
higher-level authorities when they were mistreated.
"We were paid two or three months late last year,'' Zhang said. "If
the manager fails to paid all our wages, we can get several
thousand yuan to help us through the festival and, when we come
back in one or two months, the manager will pay the rest in the
future.''
Wen said farm workers are a valuable and plentiful labor force that
will buoy up China's continued economic growth and should not be
undervalued.
China now has a transient population of 70 million. Increases in
the number of migrant laborers are inevitable as the economy
develops.
Statistics indicate that China's farm workers return about 100
billion yuan (US$12.1 billion) in income to their places of origin
each year.
(China
Daily January 25, 2002)