Accidents waiting to happen
- Source: Global Times
- [08:33 January 17 2011]
- Comments
A 52-year-old plasterer surnamed Liang stands atop a 20-story crane protesting insufficient compensation on December 23 in the prefecture-level city of Liuzhou in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Two days earlier, a fire in his construction site dormitory destroyed all his property, reportedly including 3,000-yuan cash. Liang was compensated 1,000 yuan. After hanging for one and half hours, he was given the remaining 2,000 yuan.
By Xu Donghuan
The longest wait was almost over. Word came on the first day after New Year holidays that he could get his three months' wages at the office of Beijing Jiayu Door and Window Company in neighboring Fengtai district.
His hair was messy, face unshaven and jacket dusty, but Zhang Jianzhang had packed his bags and was ready to leave the moment hard cash hit hard hands.
He'd already been waiting a month and Zhang, 37, and his two roommates now only had a few hours more to sit in their 10-square meter dormitory room on the construction site of the just-completed Sanyang Residential Complex in southeastern Beijing's e-town.
Most of the morning, Zhang sat on his bunk bed playing with his cellphone. He couldn't wait to break the news to the family back in his village 50 kilometers from the prefecture-level city of Handan, Hebei Province.
Without his foreman, Zhang wasn't authorized to pick up his wages.
Zhang Huixiao showed up about 12. He immediately refused to go.
"If I go with you three to collect the money now," he said, "what about the other workers who already left for home?"
Zhang Huixiao worried if only three went today, the company might delay the rest of his workers' wages until after Chinese new year.
As the foreman and official labor subcontractor, Zhang Huixiao knew that delaying workers' wages is a standard practice on construction sites. He had just come back from a morning with the Chaoyang District Labor Dispute Arbitration Committee awaiting the result of his request for wages from another door and window company where his workers had toiled from March to September last year.
Zhang Huixiao's position was simple: He wouldn't go with Zhang Jianzhang and pick up a single penny until the company paid everyone under his employ.
Zhang Jianzhang erupted.
Taking out a double-edged vegetable peeler from under his bed, he stood in front of his foreman and threatened to kill himself.
"I've got a family at home waiting!" Zhang Jianzhang yelled, tears trickling down his cheeks.
"Have you ever thought about that?"
Back home, two children, an 80-year-old grandmother and a wife are tending to Zhang's less-than-one acre of cotton.
Then with all his might, Zhang lifted the slim foreman up off the floor. The door was kicked open.
Zhang Huixiao clung to the railings of the bunkbed, refusing to let go.
