Huang Qunyue and his three colleagues just wanted their old jobs back. What they got was stone-walling, harassment and intimidation.
The four workers were long-standing employees of the state-owned power company in Hunan’s Ningyuan County. They had good, stable jobs with decent benefits, but lacked a formal labour contract. In 2007 the power company tried to bypass new legislation compelling a formal contract. It secretly reassigned the workers to a subsidiary as temporary dispatch workers.
