They toiled for 17 days in the sub-zero temperatures of Urumqi
in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, but Zhang Huihua and his
team of lawyers drew strength from the results of their
investigations.
"It has been a freezing endeavor, but we have secured some
heartwarming results," the lawyer said of Urumqi's -20 C
temperatures after returning to Xinyang in Henan Province on
Thursday.
Leading a team of six lawyers, Zhang, who is also deputy
director of the Xinyang judicial affairs bureau, was on a mission
to seek redress for tens of thousands of Xinyang migrant workers
seeking defaulted wage payments.
After rounds of negotiations based on the findings of their
investigations, the team of lawyers helped about 300 migrant
workers win back 6 million yuan ($835,000) in 17 days.
"The work is far from done, but it's the start of a new
beginning," Zhang said.
He said his team has found a new approach to helping the
workers.
They have moved away from the conventional method, which sees
migrant workers asking for back pay individually from the legal aid
office, he said.
"After preliminary investigations, we found that lots of the
companies that owed pay to workers were State-run, which have clear
accounting records," he said.
Most of the debts stemmed from incomplete labor contracts and
unsettled or delayed payments, Zhang said.
After rounds of meetings with legal aid offices affiliated to
the Xinjiang Production and Construction Group, Xinjiang Uygur
autonomous region and Urumqi, Zhang's team endorsed a memo with its
Xinjiang counterparts to resolve the problem.
Zhang said they have some way to go. It is estimated more than
100,000 laborers have been working on construction sites in
Xinjiang since the 1980s.
"A report by the Xinyang government said that default pay to the
workers was about 80 million yuan," he said.
Many of the construction workers are said to be concentrated in
the Shihezi and Karamay areas.
Zheng Yongjun, a lawyer on Zhang's team, summarized the work of
the mission as "a double insurance for success, by incorporating
legal muscle with government help".
(China Daily January 29, 2008)