CHINA: Chinese police rescued 30 migrant workers who were held as slaves and forced to work in a brick kiln in the north of the country, the latest case to highlight the plight of many of China's 120 million wandering labourers.
The case comes just days after the State Council vowed it would do more to protect migrant workers, the powerless and downtrodden labourers caught on the wrong side of China's widening income gap.
About 800 million of China's 1.3 billion people live in the countryside; in the past 20 years they have flocked to the country's booming cities, working in the factories, building the roads and transporting the goods that have fuelled rampant expansion of the world's fastest growing economy. Many earn little more than a euro a day.
In the latest case, one young man escaped from the brick kiln and went to a police station in Yuncheng city, the Shanxi Evening News reported, saying he and dozens of other poor farmers had been held captive at the brick-works and forced to work.
Police raided the kiln at 7pm and found 30 men, aged from 15 to 61 years, working there in dreadful conditions. They arrested three men, including a contractor from Henan province.
The newspaper said the men, who hailed from China's migrant worker heartlands of Sichuan, Shandong, Hubei and Shaanxi provinces, wept and embraced each other on being freed.
The men had been hired by an illegal job agency in Yuncheng and confined to the brickworks where they were forced to do heavy labour for up to 18 hours every day. They were locked in a shed at night.
Meanwhile, the Beijing government acknowledges that millions of migrant workers are underpaid or working in poor conditions and has introduced legislation to stop employers delaying wages, but it is hard to enact these laws. Government statistics estimates workers are owed an estimated 20 billion yuan, about €2 billion, in unpaid salaries.