Range of abuses

Labor rights violations are as varied as the different working groups in China.

In Zhejiang province, sick leave often goes unpaid - though by law, workers must receive at least 60 percent of their regular wage on sick days - and employers often demand excessive overtime work at labor-intensive businesses, said Huang Xinfa, a lawyer and member of the Hangzhou Lawyers Association, who specializes in labor and social insurance.

In addition, the minimum wage in the province - 1,300 yuan a month in the highest of the province's three categories - is too low, Huang said.

It's estimated that about 60 percent of companies in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province, do not pay employee leave unless asked by inspectors, Huang said.

In many cases, excessive overtime is demanded. In an extreme case, he said, workers were required to put in 200 hours of overtime a month, nearly six times the maximum overtime permitted in China.

In the Pearl River Delta region, manufacturers often illegally withhold the last month's salary of workers who quit, local activists said.

At the end of the year, many businesses were shorthanded and went to great lengths to discourage workers from leaving jobs, said Su Yuan, head of Xiaoxiaocao Information Center, a Shenzhen-based organization that protects workers' rights.

"Many companies in the region would regard workers' resignations as quitting without notice, and would not pay them salaries for the last one or half month," she said. "They broke the law, which says employees have a right to quit and go to new jobs if they give 30 days' notice."

Another common violation is forcing workers to take paid leave instead of giving them the legally mandated extra pay for holiday work. Some companies simply wiped holiday attendance records clean to avoid being caught by labor department inspections, Su said.

One reason all this is possible, experts said, is that although China has adequate labor laws, they are poorly enforced, at times because infractions go unreported.