As Spring Festival approaches, many migrant workers are fighting to obtain money owed to them by unscrupulous bosses who have held back their wages. Xinhua News Agency reports from Changchun.

Lyu Qingfa was making his 16th trip to Tonghua, Jilin pro-vince, in two years to demand wages held in arrears for him and his employees. On Jan 26, he boarded a full coach and departed from Changchun, capital of the Northeast China province, to travel 400 kilometers to Tonghua. During the trip he was surrounded by migrants on their annual exodus home.

With the Lunar New Year holiday fast approaching, a festive atmosphere hung in the air: all the other passengers were hauling huge trunks and gift boxes. Lyu, 60, was the only one traveling empty-handed.

He misses his family desperately. But he cannot go home knowing that 20 of his employees are still waiting for a total of 3.25 million yuan ($494,000) in wages that have been withheld for three years.

'Wait a while'

In October 2011, Lyu, a subcontractor, employed about 100 construction workers for a civil construction project in Tonghua. "The project was to be completed in two years and three months, and the contractor would pay me 7.85 million yuan in wages, according to our contract," he said.

But when the project was completed, the contractor, a subsidiary of the State-owned Beijing Shougang Construction Group, paid just 4.6 mill-ion yuan, and told Lyu to "wait a while" for the rest of the money.

The "while" has dragged into two years. Lyu paid about 80 of the workers out of his own pocket so they could either return home or find a new job. He quickly ran out of cash.

His latest trip to Tonghua was prompted by news that the head of the contractor's office in Beijing was traveling to Tonghua. "The big boss might help settle the payment in arrears," Lyu said.

He spent all of Jan 27 in the contractor's office waiting for news, only to be told the contractor needed to collect money it was owed before he could be paid.

China's construction sector is a hierarchy, and migrant workers are firmly at the bott-om. Each level of contractor gets paid by the level above, pockets some profit and pays those on the next rung down. If the cash flow is stopped by one shady contractor in the hierarchy, everyone at the lower levels suffers.

Chen Sheng, a carpenter from Sichuan province in the southwest, was luckier than Lyu: he was finally paid on Jan 25, after waiting about six months for his wages at a construction site about 1,000 km from his home.

But before he received the money, Chen and his 10-member family could only afford two meals a day, mainly rice and abandoned, half-rotten vegetables collected at a grocery market. He was paid 1,000 yuan when the construction project was completed in August, but no work has been available for months.

Two weeks ago, the family celebrated his mother's 70th birthday in their temporary shelter, a prefabricated hut at the construction site.

The elderly woman longed to go home, but Chen had no money to buy even the cheapest train ticket. Chen's eldest son complained that Chen was to blame for the old lady's suffering, and the birthday dinner ended with a fight between the two men.

Feng Qiang, the contractor who owes Chen his wages, claimed to be a victim himself. "The development company was supposed to pay me 17 million yuan by August, but by the end of last year, only 1.5 million yuan had been paid," he said.

Feng eventually used his car and his apartment in Zhengzhou as collateral and borrowed 3 million yuan to cover the migrant workers' wages.

Phone calls to Zhang Zhipeng, the chief executive of the development company, went unanswered.

Missing bosses

For nearly two years, Wang Guihai, a native of East China's Anhui province, has been demanding wages owned to him and 110 fellow workers at a furniture plant in Shanghai.

Their boss fled in April 2014, owing 1.1 million yuan. Toward the end of the year, the workers reported the case to the authorities in Shanghai's Qingpu district, where the plant was located. The boss was detained by police in August on suspicion of intentionally avoiding paying his debts.

The boss, surnamed Wang, insisted he was innocent. "I ran away because I had no money," he said during a period of detention in Shanghai. "I'll pay them when I can, but who knows when I can earn a million?"

He shrugged off the workers' grievances with a light-hearted, "So what? Who has never been in debt? It's just natural to owe someone some money when you're really in trouble."

He will stand trial before Chinese New Year. Wang Guihai may need to appear in court as a witness. "All we care about is when we will get the money we deserve, not whether the boss is thrown in jail," he said.

According to Zhang Zhiqing, a police officer in Qingpu, it is not easy for the courts to decide whether employers have deliberately refused to pay their employees: "They may have transferred all their assets beforehand, and then claim to be penniless."

From January to November last year, Shanghai's labor and social security authorities handled 2,353 cases concerning nonpayment of wages, and helped 133,000 workers obtain 430 million yuan of unpaid wages.

Fifty-four unsolved cases, involving 28.8 million yuan, were passed over to the public security authorities, Zhang said.

Across China, labor and social security authorities are helping migrant workers recoup unpaid wages through negotiations with employers, or even via coercive measures.

In the past six months, authorities in North China's Hebei province have helped 243,000 workers get 2.4 billion yuan of unpaid wages.

When his teacher asked Wang Ziming to write a letter to his parents, who work in Guangdong province, the 13-year-old wrote: "Dear Mom and Dad, I dream of becoming a lawyer so I can help you in lawsuits demanding wages in arrears. You can never imagine how sad I am when you finally come home at the end of the year, exhausted, disappointed and without getting paid ..."

The straight-A student at a rural school in Guizhou pro-vince, Southwest China, said the annual reunion with his parents was often "bittersweet".

"I miss them and long to spend more time with them. But they resent their bosses, and they are often irritable and sometimes discipline me over small matters," he said.

(China Daily 02/02/2016 page6)