CLOSELY WATCHED: A drug store in Yinchuan, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Expensive medicines have been a subject of public complaint for years (XINHUA)

Giving Workers More

The All-China Federation of Trade Unions recently said the proportion of Chinese residents' labor remuneration to the country's gross domestic product had been falling for 22 years, from a peak of 56.5 percent in 1983 to 36.7 percent in 2005. In contrast, from 1978 to 2005, the proportion of return on capital to gross domestic product jumped by 20 percentage points. However, return on capital belongs to the state, enterprises and the rich, and has almost nothing to do with ordinary people.

Such a trend has widened the rich-poor gap while depriving ordinary workers of their dignity as laborers. The latest survey by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions shows 23.4 percent of the country's average workers have lived on an unchanging wage for five years, and 61 percent of the respondents believe excessively low pay of average workers represents the worst unfairness currently in society.

Workers' wages are calculated into product costs. If they are raised, businesses' operating costs will rise and their profits will shrink. To cope with this problem, some businesses choose not to increase workers' wages. Today, 70 percent of Chinese workers are employed by private enterprises, where payment is largely decided by their investors and operators. Businesses may also choose to raise product prices to offset wage increases, but it is very likely to boost consumer prices and even trigger inflation.

One of the effective ways to raise workers' wages is to cut government fiscal revenue. People's Daily reported on May 12 that, in the first four months of this year, government fiscal revenue jumped by 34.1 percent year on year.

Excessively high government fiscal revenue has affected ordinary people's welfare. So, it's time to allocate more social wealth to average workers through raising their wages.

Workers' Daily

Hard Payment

Several rural workers in Zhengzhou, central China's Henan Province, were beaten by their employer and his musclemen when they asked for their wages, which had been due for a year and a half, Henan Business Daily reported on May 10.

Since the workers cannot afford to pay high medical charges to get a seriously injured colleague treated, they had to beg on the streets.

It must be asked: Why didn't local government departments, such as labor and construction authorities, take any action in the one-and-a-half years during which the workers were not paid their wages? It should be their responsibility to guarantee workers are paid on time.

The more shameful thing is that none of these departments or their officials has taken the blame for the workers' sufferings.

Zhujiang Evening News

Expensive Medicine

A hospital in central China's Hunan Province was recently found to have sold an anti-cancer medicine, whose factory price is 15.5 yuan ($2.3) per case, to a patient at 213 yuan ($31.3).

This huge profit margin of 1,300 percent highlights the mess the medicine market is in. Generally speaking, a commodity goes through the process of leaving the factory, wholesaling and retailing before it arrives in consumers' hands. But this is not the case with medicine. It reaches patients through pharmaceutical companies, medical salespersons and doctors. More importantly, every link in the process involves a kickback, and finally a medicine that was cheap to manufacture will sell at a crazy high price.

The medicine market is now sick and unfair, and patients have to pay for its illness. Instead of being well-informed about the situation, relevant regulators seem totally unaware of currently chaotic medicine prices and necessary regulation is therefore not in place at all.

The health care reform has been going on for years. However, patients are not paying less but more for medical care. A major objective of the reform is to keep medicine prices at a reasonable level. What matters a lot here is strengthening supervision over the medicine market, and relevant departments need to take action now!

Yangcheng Evening News

Bad Compensation

In recent years, some farmers in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, who became rich overnight because of the government's land acquisition, spent the money crazily on luxurious cars and clothes and even became involved in gambling. Some of them have already slipped back into poverty because of reckless spending.

Compared with the farmers who were not compensated, these farmers are lucky. But this piece of news fills us with anxiety: What will the landless farmers do when they've run out of the compensation money?

As an agricultural country, the land offers farmers job opportunities and social security. For farmers, compensation for land loss is important, but more important is something that can will ensure their jobs and pension benefits.

Farmers need to make use of the compensation in a rational way, so the limited amount they received will sustain them for the rest of the life and even benefit their offspring. But also the government should not abandon farmers on the acquired land once the compensation has been paid. It needs to do something to ensure those farmers will not go back to living a poor life by providing vocational training and basic social security.

Beijing Times