A special auction was held on Sunday outside a restaurant at Fushi Road where the employees tried to sell the establishment's fixtures to make up for their overdue pay, Beijing Times reports.

Believing that their employer had run away with embezzled funds, the cooks and wait staff put the restaurant's tables and chairs up for sale at the roadside.

They set up an eye-catching red signboard bearing the words "auction for life's sake" to promote the sale. One of the employees confided to a reporter that they hadn't received their pay for three months and their boss had also disappeared mysteriously. Most of the workers are now subsisting on very little food and many have to sleep on shakedown beds at a hotel, he added.

But the auction failed to attract any buyers. None of the chairs or tables had been sold by the afternoon.

Close