Labor and social security departments at district and county level in the city have been asked to crack down on the deliberate underpayment of migrant workers.

Flocks of farm workers who have worked for a year in cities will go home soon to enjoy the Spring Festival with their families.

Li Yuping, an official with Beijing's Chaoyang District Labor and Social Security Bureau, said: "Our responsibility is to make sure that farm workers get paid fairly after a year of hard work."

Some of the bureau's administrative functions have been taken over by local community committees and village governments to reinforce the protection of farm workers' rights, Li said.

The bureau has organized classes to train law-enforcement assistants for village governments and community committees.

Thanks to their efforts, the bureau has received only a few dozen complaints from farm workers about payment defaults so far this year, a lot less than in the same period last year.

However, several robberies were carried out by migrant workers last week and this has aroused the concern of the city's labor and social-security departments.

It was reported that several migrant workers broke into the homes of some Beijing residents to look for money because they had been underpaid.

Wen Xueguo, a professor of economics with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said: "Prolonged defaults on payment will lead some workers to go to extremes, which not only threatens the security of the public but also causes a crisis of credibility.

"Workers should use legal weapons to protect themselves," Wen said. However, many farm workers are unaware of their legal rights.

A Sichuan-based 18-year-old farm worker surnamed Zhang said he and his fellow workers at a building site in Shaoyaoju in Chaoyang District never thought of submitting their complaints to higher-level authorities when they were mistreated.

"We were paid two or three months late last year,'' Zhang said. "If the manager fails to paid all our wages, we can get several thousand yuan to help us through the festival and, when we come back in one or two months, the manager will pay the rest in the future.''

Wen said farm workers are a valuable and plentiful labor force that will buoy up China's continued economic growth and should not be undervalued.

China now has a transient population of 70 million. Increases in the number of migrant laborers are inevitable as the economy develops.

Statistics indicate that China's farm workers return about 100 billion yuan (US$12.1 billion) in income to their places of origin each year.

(China Daily January 25, 2002)