Chinese New Year, but where’s the money?

Construction workers at a building site in Shangai. cc Thomas Berg

‘We drove more than 2000 km from Beijing to Shenzhen and handed out over 10,000 questionnaires along the way,’ said Wei Wei, director of the Chinese labour NGO Little Bird, after a month-long roadtrip interviewing construction workers. That was three years ago. They had thousands of answers, confirming that, in construction, wages were withheld for months. Most workers didn’t receive monthly, or even half-yearly, payments and simply hoped to get paid by the end of the year, even though, by law, wages should be paid monthly.

Since Little Bird was founded, nearly 20 years ago, its telephone hotline has helped more than 50,000 migrant workers, half of them employed in construction.

But according to Wei Wei, the situation hasn’t improved much. Hundreds of thousands of workers aren’t paid in keeping with their proper wages, if they are paid at all. Half of all construction workers have been deprived of proper payment at least once in their lives, according to Chinese labour groups and experts.

High-rises construction have been booming business for years in China. Peter Bengsten

Now, with Chinese New Year on 16 February, workers are stepping up their protests. The China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong based non-profit, says the construction sector accounts for over a third of all protests registered on its online Strike Map. ‘Such protests are just the tip of the iceberg. Many workers keep a low profile out of fear for violence by thugs or police,’ said Keegan Elmer, a researcher there. ‘Many give up and go back to their home town or on to the next construction site.’

The widespread practice of withholding wages, or not paying at all, is well-known in China. The local and national authorities recognise that, and each year campaign to collect overdue pay. In 2016, in Zhejiang Province alone, 2.9bn yuan (€376m) was recovered and distributed among 258,000 workers.

But many more workers get no assistance. Local authorities tackle the issues only after the damage is done, and focus on compensation rather than prevention. And local labour NGOs, who are under increasing surveillance by the Xi Jinping regime and have limited capacity, approach labour problems in construction in just the same way, though some do try raising awareness of labour rights among the workers.

Besides unpaid wages, employment contracts are often non-existent, and overtime is frequently over the legal limit. As a result, workers often depend on their employers for food and housing on construction sites. Many migrant workers lack local networks when working far from their rural hometowns and, because of the household registration system (hukou), are discriminated against when they try to access social services or other forms of support. There is also the widespread matter of worksite hazards and lack of protective gear.

A labour activist receiving a distress call from a construction worker. Peter Bengsten

Dissatisfaction with these conditions is passed off as just a labour dispute. Workers rarely protest while construction is going on, knowing they can easily be replaced, and cling instead to the promise of payment at New Year or at the end of the project. But once that is com¬pleted, they have little leverage with their employers. They can then become desperate, and resort to extreme measures to get the local authorities to intervene. That may raise attention, but then they can often get put in administrative detention for weeks. That was the case of Zhato and two of his fellow workers who threatened to jump off a rooftop in Beijing last December because their wages – 140,000 yuan (€18,000) – were withheld. They attempted suicide, and got ten days detention and a fine.

‘What can you do? If you complain while work is ongoing, you get fired and never see any money,’ said Chang, a former construction worker turned activist. There are also no employment contracts or work-related injury insurance, and no overtime payment. And so on.

Withholding wages is an easy way to ensure an obedient workforce, even when the direct employer (most often a smaller sub-contractor in the hierarchy of construction site companies) is himself not always paid by the senior contractor before construction work has ended. ‘Many workers are forced to take unreasonable arrangements when their wages are withheld,’ said Michael Ma, project officer in SACOM, a Hong Kong-based labour NGO. ‘They have no choice but to accept the conditions at hand or get fired and lose months of pay.’

Read also Jordan Pouille, “China’s company towns”, Le Monde diplomatique, July 2012. The problem of coercive practices among migrant workers, in construction and other sectors, gets little attention in China, even though labour professionals and activists are asking for proper union representation for workers in order to facilitate collective bargaining and prevent problems, including delayed payments. President Xi Jinping spoke of this in his speech to the 19th Party Congress in October 2017, emphasising the need to ‘consolidate the tripartite system of government, trade union and enterprise negotiations so as to build harmonious labour relations and ensure that workers get a fair and decent income for their endeavours’.

But there has been no visible response by the Communist Party-controlled trade union. So, for millions of construction workers, will this Chinese New Year, with its colourful parades and fireworks, be a time to celebrate or, as in previous years, will they just be worrying about whether they’ll get paid?