No "Chinese way" excuse to keep cheating workers
- Source: Global Times
- [21:15 March 14 2010]
- Comments
By Barry Cunningham
Chinese life is such a puzzle of contradictions that many foreign newcomers feel the best we can do is keep abreast of our own ignorance about "the Chinese way."
Before I came to China last year, I naïvely believed that "the Chinese way" had something to do with the path to enlightenment. One year later, I have recognized that "the Chinese way" has little to do with Buddhism and a lot to do with making excuses.
I have heard "the Chinese way" mouthed repeatedly as an all-purpose alibi for real estate speculators grabbing farmland away from farmers, ancestral homes bulldozed with one hour's notice, migrant workers' children refused schooling under the dreaded hukou system and other social realities that would produce an unending scream of injustice were they to happen in the US or Western Europe.
The "two sessions" are trying to tackle some of these problems head-on, but the challenges are many and solutions are few.
However, there is one unfairness that could be rectified with the stroke of a pen. That would be to approve the proposal of migrant worker-turned deputy Zhu Xueqin from Shanghai that a government safety net be provided for migrant workers who don't get paid.
She proposes that the local labor and social security department set up a wage security system. The law would require that contractors set up a wage guarantee fund before they begin a construction project.
A report by the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) showed that unpaid wages for migrant workers hit 100 billion yuan ($14.6 billion) in 2006, with 70 percent of the money owed to migrants by the construction industry.
Nobody here can claim ignorance of this problem.
State media provide weekly images of haggard-looking migrant laborers huddled together on cold cement floors and surviving on bowls of rice gruel week after week, waiting to get paid for back-breaking jobs on construction projects completed months ago.
Some of these cheated workers from distant provinces were too ashamed to return home to their families with empty pockets during Spring Festival.
Many of them will never be paid by deadbeat sub-contractors who can legally claim that they personally never hired the workers, thus getting rich off the backs of the most vulnerable people in China.
Yet somehow this lack of conscience is justified by city dwellers as "the Chinese way."
Reports of a migrant worker who blew himself up in frustration over unpaid wages, another who bombed a municipal building, and an unpaid worker whose hand was chopped off when he tried to complain seem to be regarded as mere nuisances in the nation's housing boom.
Sadly, Chinese migrants are exploited overseas as well. Search for "unpaid wages" online and you will see reports of nomadic Chinese construction workers robbed of menial wages and stranded penniless in places like Bahrain, Russia, Israel, Germany and the US. In many cases, the construction boss who did the hiring was a Chinese go-between who gets his pay and then slams the door on everybody else.
After all, people shrug, that's "the Chinese way." What do you expect from a nation of deadbeat employers where workers often have to fight for their paychecks, living on nothing but promises of getting paid "some day."
"An honest day's pay for an honest day's work" was the rallying cry of the US trade labor union move-ment, and the belief in a weekly paycheck is deeply ingrained in "the American way."
