Description

From CLB:

About 2,400 workers were laid off from the then Inner Mongolia No. 2 Machine Factory from 1999 onwards. On July 4 and 5, 2005, more than 200 workers staged a sit-in at the front gate of the company, now restructured as the North Heavy Industry Group,demanding their jobs back. The workers claimed that not one of them had voluntarily agreed to their seniority buy-out. The management had told them at the time that, if they agreed to a seniority buy-out, they would a get a redundancy package that included three years of living expenses, but that if after three years they still had not agreed to a seniority buy-out, they would be considered to have voluntarily left their position and would be taken off the company rolls without any economic compensation whatsoever. However, the workers later discovered that those employees who had turned down the redundancy package were still receiving living expenses from the company and had not been taken off the company pay-roll.

[Note: This report came in the context of a discussion of post-SOE restructuring protests].