Serious default on wage payment should be listed as an offence
in an effort to bar corporate executives from doing such things,
proposed a Chinese lawmaker on Tuesday.
"The chronic problem of wage defaulting encroaches upon the
property rights of rural laborers and is prone to triggering
unrest, desperate actions and social unrest," said Fang Chaogui, a
deputy to the National People's Congress (NPC), during the ongoing
annual NPC session.
"It's unfair that an employee is deemed as a criminal if he
illegally takes 20,000 yuan (about US$2,410) of corporate property
as his own under existing laws and regulations, but companies are
free and unchecked from legal accountabilities even when they
default on the payment of millions or even tens of millions of yuan
of wages," said Fang.
That's a loophole in the legal system that has to be filled to
intensify the protection of the disadvantaged people, Fang
said.
Million upon million of migrant laborers have had a hard time in
getting back their defaulted wages, with the sum estimated at
nearly 100 billion yuan (some US$12 billion) annually in recent
years. So the rural laborers working in cities are hit hardest.
The State Council, the central government, last year launched
amass drive to get back defaulted wages for rural migrant laborers
in the field of construction, which reclaimed a combined sum of
33.1 billion yuan (some US$4 billion).?
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(Xinhua News Agency March 8, 2005)