RIGHT DEFENDERS: Trade union workers hold a publicity event on the collective salary negotiation system in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, on March 2, 2010 (ZHENG RONGXI)

According to Chinese tradition, all debts should be paid before the New Year. However, two recent cases of migrant workers being forced to go to extremes to ask for their wages highlight rising tensions between labor and management in the country.

A post with photos of dozens of migrant workers kneeling down in front of the gate of the government compound in Zunhua City, Hebei Province, quickly became popular shortly after appearing on the Internet on January 6. According to the anonymous post, these workers, after toiling for a local construction project under a low-level subcontractor for almost a year starting in November 2009, weren't paid 95 percent of their total wages. Their former boss, who paid just half of their salaries, said there was nothing he could do because the subcontractor above him paid only half of the overhead.

He Dongping, one migrant worker, later told Sichuan Daily, around 290 migrant workers working for the project were owed wages totaling around 3 million yuan ($455,000) and more than 200 workers were, like himself, from Sichuan Province. According to the report, the workers regarded petitioning the local government as a last resort to quickly retrieve their unpaid wages in time for their Spring Festival (February 3 this year) family reunion, which was one month away.

The workers' three-month odyssey to get their money back ended after the local government ordered the developer pay all of their wages on January 14.

However, not every story of recovering overtime salaries has a happy ending. On January 29, 45-year-old Liu Dejun, a farmer from Hebei Province, died in a hospital 13 days after drinking highly poisonous pesticide in front of his former boss after he was refused his unpaid salary of 3,200 yuan ($485) for a third time.

Liu was hired by a private coal transportation business as a truck driver's assistant in November 2010. On January 14, he quit his job after his boss threatened to give him a fine.

"I was so angry when he (Liu's former boss) refused to pay me again. He said if I dared to kill myself, he would give my family double pay as compensation," Liu told the police shortly after he was admitted to the hospital.

After Liu's death, his former boss paid Liu's family 260,000 yuan ($39,000) as compensation.

On December 17, 2010, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) issued a circular to trade union organizations at all levels, urging them to help migrant workers get their wages before the Spring Festival. Concrete measures include conducting field surveys to find out whether migrant workers have such complaints and address them quickly; publicizing the hotline numbers of local trade unions so that migrant workers can have access to their services, and offering emergency legal aid to workers who are owed wages or work injury compensation.

Migrant workers

According to the ACFTU, at the end of September 2010, trade unions had a total membership of 239 million in China, increasing by 13.61 million compared with one year earlier. Around 8.4 million new members are migrant workers. According to Central Government's white paper Progress in China's Human Rights in 2009, the total membership of China's trade unions has been surging by more than 15 million every year since 2005.

Apart from the growing labor disputes and the quickly enlarging membership needing help, trade unions in China also face the tasks of better representing worker rights during conflicts and establishing a collective salary negotiation system in most industries.

The average monthly income for the new generation of migrant workers, amounts to only 1,748 yuan ($266), which is half the income of enterprise workers having an urban hukou (permanent residence certificate), according to a report released by the ACFTU on February 20.

The new generation of migrant workers refers to rural residents aged between 16 and 30 years who are doing non-agricultural jobs in cities. Currently, their number is estimated at 150 million in China.

The new generation of migrant workers encounters difficulties not only from economic pressure but also from insecure legal rights. Only 85 percent of them work with a legal contract, which is 4 percentage points lower than enterprise workers having an urban hukou and 68 percent out of the contracts signed do not indicate concrete amount of monthly income. And 17 percent do not hold the official hard copies of their labor contracts.

They change jobs more frequently, 2.9 times more than their parental generation, and 38 percent of them quit jobs because of "little chance for career development."

The social security system caters little to their needs in forms of endowment insurance, medical insurance, unemployment insurance, employment injury insurance and maternity insurance, respectively 24 points, 15 points, 30 points, 9 points, 30 points lower than urban enterprises workers.

The report says young migrant workers are also paid 167 yuan ($25.3) less per month and receive worse social security compared to their parents.

According to another ACFTU survey, whose results were released in March 2010, 23.4 percent of workers said they hadn't had a pay raise for five years; 75.2 percent said the income distribution was unfair and 61 percent believed the poor pay of ordinary workers is the most outstanding problem in China's income distribution system.

Union's role

The ACFTU's work plan for 2011 says the coverage of collective salary negotiation systems among enterprises with trade unions should reach 60 percent by the end of the year and should come to 80 percent by the end of 2013.