Labour complaints

Of the nearly 2,000 labour dispute cases filed with the city’s Labour Affairs Bureau in the first eleven months of last year, 724 of the cases – or 38 per cent – related to unpaid wages totalling some 6 million patacas (US$765,872). The figures were reported by local Portuguese language newspaper Hoje Macau quoting information from the Bureau. Of the 1,879 labour complaints that the Bureau handled during the first eleven months of last year, 724 cases were complaints about unpaid wages, while 482 other cases related to severance pay, involving 2 million patacas. Business Daily approached the Bureau regarding the number of unpaid wage complaints related to the construction sector but had not received a reply by the time the story went to press. Unpaid wages to construction workers have been a subject repeatedly raised by legislators in the past few years as a lack of clarity still exists regarding the liable party responsible for paying workers employed by layers of subcontractors on construction projects. In 2012, the Labour Affairs Bureau spoke of a bill that aimed to clarify labour management duties for a construction project’s main contractor and subcontractor. But the lack of progress of the bill has been criticised by the Federation of Trade Union’s legislator Ella Lei Cheng I, who raised the issue in a written enquiry in December. The construction sector comprises the second largest employed population here after casinos: for the September-November period, Macau had a total of 56,800 employees engaged in the construction sector, which was around 14 per cent of the 396,200 employed population; the biggest employer remains the casinos, which had 85,900 employees working at the time, comprising around 24.5 per cent of the employed, latest official data shows. As for the full year of 2013, the Labour Affairs Bureau handled 2,236 labour complaints, in which 787 cases, or 35 per cent, are related to unpaid wages, the Portuguese news outlet wrote.