SHENYANG - When Wang Xiaoming and three of her co-workers had to work on the first day of the lunar Year of the Dragon, cleaning up the tons of firecracker refuse left on ground, it wasn't the potential danger or sub-zero temperatures that occupied their minds.

Instead, as the women toiled in a residential community in Northeast China's Shenyang, they wondered whether their company would pay the extra money owed them by law for working on a national holiday.

Days after the nation finished celebrating Spring Festival, their worries proved well founded. Not one of them got a single extra cent, even though under law, workers are entitled to at least two to three times their normal daily wage for holiday work.

"You can't imagine how painful it is to work on national holidays," said Wang, 59, a cleaner for a property management company. "You miss almost every family celebration."

What's more, after she worked five and a half days of the weeklong holiday, which ended on Jan 29, she only got her regular 1,000 yuan ($160) monthly salary at the end of the month.

She said that small companies in the region rarely pay employees the extra money owed them by law.

Wang's grievance, shared by many workers on the bottom rung of society, underscores the prevalence of labor rights violations in this segment of China's labor force despite the nation's persistent efforts in the past decade to protect workers.

Aside from the missing holiday pay, workers at small private companies often work long, intensive hours for low salaries, and get no social insurance or adequate protection from work hazards, workers' advocates and lawyers say.

Small, privately owned companies typically have more labor rights violations than large factories because investments or orders from foreign companies bring pressure from the overseas owners or clients to eliminate sweatshop conditions, workers' rights advocates say.

Small businesses are also less likely to come under scrutiny from the media, trade unions and law enforcement agencies.

More than 80 percent of labor disputes and most strikes are at small or medium-sized enterprises, said Zhang Mingqi, vice-chairman of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), at a labor relations conference in Beijing in December.

To make matters worse, small businesses made less than a 3 percent profit from January to July because of slowing economic growth, rising labor costs and financing difficulties in China, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The smaller companies' poor performance led to a rise in labor disputes and strikes.

To address the problem, the ACFTU is sending more than 100,000 union officials to workshops across the country to alleviate strained relations between business owners and workers, Zhang said. It has also been promoting collective bargaining systems and the establishment of trade unions.

China adopted a series of measures to improve labor protection and workers' quality of life.

Labor contracts were signed among 97 percent of all enterprises, and 65 percent of small enterprises as of 2010, according to the latest figures released by China's Information Office of the State Council in July.

In 2009 and 2010, the State investigated and dealt with 819,000 cases of violations of workers' rights in which employers would not sign labor contracts, pay salaries promptly, or participate in social insurance programs in accordance with the law.

In those two years, 2 million illegal acts were investigated and dealt with, 33,400 companies and projects that engaged in illegal production and operation were closed or canceled, and 13.6 million workplace safety hazards were eliminated.

More than 95 percent of workers in the city had signed collective contracts as of 2011, while petitions filed for labor disputes plunged 33 percent over the previous year, showed statistics from the Shenyang Federation of Trade Unions.

But significant problems remain. China saw an increasing number of labor disputes in recent years. ACFTU figures showed that mediation organizations received 406,000 labor dispute cases across the country in 2010, a 12.1 percent year-on-year rise.

Late last year, thousands of workers walked out at an LG Display factory in Nanjing to protest shrinking year-end bonuses. The company ended up paying workers a bonus equal to two times their monthly pay.

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.

Regarding non-payment of holiday pay, many workers said they would not report violations for fear of retaliation or dismissal.

"I saw the news scrolling on TV that there was a hotline for workers to report companies that wouldn't give them their extra holiday pay," said Xu Peiying, who works for a mid-sized supermarket in Northeast China's Liaoning province and did not get extra compensation for working five of the seven days of the Spring Festival holiday.

"But what would the company do to informants if it found out they were tipping off authorities?" she said.

If labor inspectors do not audit businesses, workers have to cope with the violations.

Some business owners, however, object to the universal application of the holiday pay policy, saying they will suffer losses if they comply.

Qiao Fan, who runs a foot massage shop in Chongqing, said the shop's income was not enough to cover labor costs if workers were paid three times a normal wage. He had to close shop during Spring Festival.

The inefficiency of grassroots trade unions is also blamed for the labor rights violations.

Some grassroots unions have not properly represented or protected workers' rights, said Chang Kai, a human resources professor at Renmin University of China. None of the 300 strikes across the country in 2010 was organized by the trade unions, he said. Some of the strikes, in fact, demanded the restructuring of grassroots trade unions.

Meanwhile, grassroots organizations that advocate workers' rights are sprouting up across the country, but they are struggling to gain legal status.

Existing social organizations, such as trade unions, are sufficient to eliminate labor rights violations, said Liu Jun, founder of Honghuacao, an organization in Shenzhen to protect workers' rights. "But their performance falls short."

"Workers don't have faith in these organizations," he said. Therefore, many turn to NGOs like Honghuacao for help.

But many organizations like Honghuacao are seen as troublemakers by authorities, and have a hard time registering as NGOs so that they can exert more influence than providing legal education and entertainment for workers.

"No government department is willing to serve as their business administrators, which is required of civil service agencies that intend to register as an NGO," said Zhang Zhiru, head of Chunfeng, one of the largest and earliest grassroots organizations in Shenzhen to offer consulting services to workers.

Referring to his experience trying to find a business administrator for Chunfeng years ago, he said: "They passed the buck to each other."

Chunfeng had to register as a commercial enterprise instead of an NGO.

Liu Ce contributed to this story.