About 40 Chinese railroad workers knelt down outside the Beijing headquarters of State-owned China Railway Construction Corporation (CRCC) on Wednesday morning to ask for wage raises, despite fearing that they might be fired.
According to a report by news outlet caixin.com on Wednesday, the demonstrators from CRCC-affiliated railway administration in Xi'an, the capital of Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, have been working for CRCC as temporary employees for over 20 years.
Their salaries are the same as those they received a decade ago and are lower than those of permanent employees.
This is not the first time that railroad workers have rallied to ask for higher payment. Employers from the cities of Beijing, Shenyang in Liaoning Province, Harbin in Heilongjiang Province and Hohhot in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region have also petitioned against payment reduction.
A notice issued by CRCC to increase salaries in early 2015 has not been implemented, several railway officials told caixin.com.
Many CRCC employees said their monthly salaries were reduced by a maximum of 1,500 yuan ($233) this year, according to the report.
Zhao Jian, a professor at Beijing Jiaotong University, told the Global Times that the salary reductions were due to CRCC's continuing deficit, which he mainly attributed to shrinking freight volume.
CRCC's revenue in the first three quarters of 2015 was 9 percent lower than that of the same period in 2014, and revenue derived from freight was down 17.5 billion yuan, according to caixin.com.
Zhao said the company transports relatively few cars and containers, a more profitable business than transporting coal and steel, which now constitutes a major portion of the company's freight business.
The company also has not attracted sufficient investment from the private sector while greatly expanding railway construction, Zhao said.
He explained that investors are reluctant to take on risk by investing in railroads, as they have no say in how the company spends their money.
Zhao noted that CRCC's investment portfolio largely favors high-speed rail, which costs a lot but currently generates little profit.
CRCC has also been troubled by a 66 percent debt-to-asset ratio in the first three quarters of this year, caixin.com reported.
