Liu Dejun swallowed pesticide and died after a long agony. His little daughter and two sisters, who expected him home, depended on his financial support to live. His employer had denied him 3,200 yuan in back pay. The tragedy is the result of the lack of rights for migrant workers, experts say.

Beijing (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Liu Dejun, a Hebei migrant worker killed himself by swallowing pesticide after his boss refused to pay him 3,200 yuan (US$ 500) in back pay before the Lunar New Year holiday. For the unskilled labourer it was too much to take.

Liu was supposed to go home in Xinglong County with money for his 11-year-old daughter and his two sisters, but on 16 January, he swallowed 70 grams of paraquat, a highly toxic pesticide, dying on 29 January, after a long agony. He had worked since November for a company owned by a man named Wang Hai, in Yutian County, who refused to pay him back pay. State-owned news agency Xinhua reported that Wang ended up paying Liu’s family 260,000 yuan in compensation.

Chinese migrants often live and work far from their families and go home only for Chinese News Year. Liu’s family instead piled up debts to pay for his medical bill, money it badly needed to live on.

In Communist China, it is not rare for companies to steal workers’ back pay. According to official statistics, in Beijing alone, 800,000 migrants were owed outstanding back pay for 1.63 billion yuan. However, the problem is nationwide.

Official data show that at the end of 2006, more than one million migrants in Guangdong were owed 1.84 billion yuan (US$ 236 million); similarly, 130,000 migrant workers in Gansu were waiting for 130 million yuan (see “Wages stolen from migrant workers amount to millions of euros,” in AsiaNews, 13 February 2007). Many cases end up in court.

In some workers take their own lives (see “Migrant worker blows himself up because he was not paid,” in AsiaNews, 23 April 2009) or are killed (see “Migrant worker who killed to get wages executed,” in AsiaNews, 21 October 2005) over back pay disputes. In September, at least 114 migrant workers were beaten up in Shaanxi for demanding payment of their salaries.

For years, workers have had a hard time in getting justice. Recently, the authorities have become more involved in such situations. On Friday, five State Council agencies urged related departments, private enterprises and contractors to take all necessary steps to prevent back pay disputes on lunar New Year when hundreds of millions of migrants go home. Local governments are now required to pay immediately wages to migrant workers involved in disputes and then collect from wayward companies.

Observers note however that the problem can only be solved if migrant workers are guaranteed more rights (see “Two thirds of Chinese migrants working illegally,” in AsiaNews, 22 January 2010 and “Chinese migrants, manual labourers without pay and without rights,” in AsiaNews, 14 January 2008) and allow them to form trade unions independent of the national trade union, which is an agency of the Communist Party acting in the interests of the state, not of workers.

• china
• workers’
• rights
• pesticide
• liu
• dejun
• back
• pay