East China’s Jiangsu province has intensified its efforts to deal with wages in arrears for migrant workers in a bid to ensure that they are all paid before returning to their hometowns for the Spring Festival later this month.
Local governments have been instructed to conduct a probe into migrant workers' wages by posting complaint hotlines online and QR code at construction sites.
The government has required closer supervision and harsher punishments to put an end to the payment default issue.
The hardest part of the campaign will be carried out in the construction sector and other labor-intensive sectors that have the largest number of migrant workers.
In Yixing, a suspect was recently arrested for wage defaults. He was ordered by the authorities to raise 960,000 yuan in total to pay 46 migrant workers the wage that have been in arrears for three years.
A court in Dafeng district of Yancheng city has ordered priority payment for migrant workers’ wages. 40 migrant workers were recently were paid 1.87 million yuan wages in arrears.
In Nantong, an employer reached compromise with the workers to agree the payment of the wages in five years. The first batch of wages in arrears that come to 1 million yuan in total were recently given to 40 migrant workers.
China has made headway toward the goal of eradicating wage defaults as the ratio of rural migrant workers troubled by wage defaults has dropped, Wang Cheng, an official with the State Council's leading group of eradicating wage defaults for migrant workers, told a press conference at the end of October.
In 2018, around 0.6 percent of surveyed migrant rural workers faced wage defaults, down from 4 percent in 2008, Wang said, citing monitoring results by the National Bureau of Statistics.
The country will carry out a winter campaign over wage defaults from Nov 15, 2019, to the 2020 Spring Festival, said Wang.
Aside from inspections, Chinese authorities are also saying that local officials will be held accountable for not cracking down on companies that don't pay their employees.
In the first half of 2019, a total of 4.2 billion yuan in arrears was recovered and paid to about 443,000 workers, official data showed.
