Chinese authorities are investigating reports that dozens of men armed with steel pipes and bars attacked a group of migrant construction workers seeking unpaid back wages, officials and reports said yesterday.
Six migrants were injured, two of them seriously, in the attack on Tuesday in Xian, a city in northern China's Shaanxi province, the state-run newspaper Shanghai Daily reported Friday.
The government office overseeing the construction site said Friday it had ordered the real estate developer to pay the workers their overdue wages.
"We will supervise the developer and make sure that every worker can get his money back," said a press spokesman at the Xian High-tech Development Zone, who like many government officials gave only his surname, Wang.
According to Wang, the construction company ran out of money after the real estate developer failed to pay it.
"By now, we have a list of more than 100 people who are owed about 1 million yuan [US$12,000] in wages" in total, he said.
"We're waiting for the list to be completed. The developer has promised to pay all the money within one week of checking and confirming the list."
A group of workers, mostly farmers from neighboring Sichuan province, had summoned local reporters to complain about their unpaid wages, and were arguing with a manager of the construction company when about 30 people arrived and began beating them, the newspaper reported.
Phone calls to the Xian police were not answered Friday morning.
The front-page Shanghai Daily report highlighted the attack as a sign that labor laws meant to protect migrant workers are poorly enforced. Official reports put the number of such itinerant laborers at 140 million, most of them underemployed farmers who seek construction work and other manual labor disdained by city dwellers.
Top communist party leaders have been demanding better enforcement of laws meant to protect such workers, but implementation at the local level is weak.
"Migrants deserve respect," said a headline on the newspaper's editorial page. It said the case was "but one little sliver of a nationwide story."
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