China Labour Bulletin appears in the following article. Copyright remains with the original publisher.
Police forcibly settled a protest this week by a crowd demanding back wages at a military-industrial factory in northern China, a labor rights group said Friday.
While detaining 15 of the estimated 300 former workers who gathered at the factory gates Tuesday to demand back wages from Mongolia North Heavy Industries Group Corp. Ltd. in Baotou, several officers used violence and three people were hurt, according to the China Labor Bulletin in Hong Kong.
Officers hit a woman in the chest, breaking bones, and beat two others, the group claimed.
It said one of those hurt was a protest organizer.
The workers were demanding "large amounts" of wages and benefits they believe the company withheld in 1998 and 1999, China Labor Bulletin said. It called the protest part of a series of activities, including appeals to Beijing, from 1999 to 2004 to get back wages.
About 2,000 laid-off or reassigned workers did not get paid, the bulletin said.
Protesting workers say that from 1997 they were "intimidated" into taking layoff packages that left them without adequate pay, according to the bulletin.
State enterprise workers technically accrue severance for each year they work as insurance against layoffs or other changes to the factory.
Baotou, the largest city in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, is one of China's older industrial bases.
Like cities elsewhere in northern China, it has faced unemployment issues since the 1990s, when nationwide economic reforms prompted factory bankruptcies, closures or mass layoffs.
13 July 2005