Lyu Qingfa is making his 16th trip to Tonghua in two years in order to demand wages held in arrears for him and his employees.
He boarded a full coach on Tuesday and departed from Changchun, capital of northeast China's Jilin Province, to travel 400 km to Tonghua. During the trip he was surrounded by migrants on their annual exodus home.
The Chinese Lunar New Year holiday is 10 days away and festivity is in the air: all 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 20 of his employees are still waiting for a total of 3.25 million yuan (494,000 U.S. dollars) in wages that have been withheld for three years.
DEMANDING PAY
Lyu, a subcontractor, employed about 100 construction workers for a civil construction project in Tonghua in October 2011. "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."
But the contractor, a subsidiary of the state-owned Beijing Shougang Construction Group Co. Ltd., paid only 4.6 million yuan after the project was completed, and told him to "wait a while" for the rest of the money.
The "while" has dragged into two years. Lyu paid most of the workers out of his own pocket so that they could either go back home or find a new job. Soon enough, he ran out of cash himself.
His latest trip to Tonghua was prompted by news that the head of the contractor's headquarters in Beijing was traveling to Tonghua. "The big boss might help settle the payment in arrears," said Lyu.
He spent the whole day Wednesday in the contractor's office waiting for news, only to be told the contractor needed to collect its own money in arrears before paying him.
China's construction sector has formed a hierarchy, with migrant workers at the bottom. Each level of contractor gets paid by the upper level, pockets some profit and pays those beneath them. When the cash flow is stopped by one shady contractor in the hierarchy, everyone at the lower level has to suffer.
Chen Sheng, a carpenter from southwest China's Sichuan Province, was luckier than Lyu: he waited less than six months for wages at a construction site 621 miles from home and was finally paid on Jan. 25.
But before he got paid, Chen and his 10-member family could only afford two meals a day, consisting of rice and deserted, half-rotten vegetables collected at a grocery market. He was paid 1,000 yuan when the construction project was completed in August and no job was 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 Chen was to blame for granny's suffering, and the birthday dinner ended with a fight between the two men.
