From the Southern Weekend, Feb 8, 2007, translated by ESWN:
This is the end of the Chinese year again. The migrant workers are demanding their wages again. The sub-contractors are on the run again “with the money.” This reminds me of sub-contractor Wang Ruifeng, and how he knelt in front of us.
It was the end of year 2004. I was working for another newspaper. At the time, my newspaper together with five other newspapers were working with the Labor Supervisory Department to obtain back wages for migrant workers. During that period, we were dealing every day with at least five groups of migrant workers who had not gotten paid.
I remembered that on a certain Thursday afternoon, a group of emotionally aroused and desperate migrant workers came to our newspaper. Their leader Wang Ruiping said that they had worked at a certain worksite for almost three years without getting paid a cent. The sub-contractor was someone from their own village named Wang Ruifeng, who could never be reached by telephone. During the conversation, one migrant laborer said, “If we can’t get paid, he better not expect to live.” We got the migrant laborers to calm down while we tried to figure out how to locate this Wang Ruifeng person. [Full Text]
