Those Years I Worked at a Heartless Factory

Yang Zhiqiang, a young man from Guizhou, joined Xin Hui Electronics with dreams of escaping poverty, only to fall into a labor scam involving collusion with Hongwei Technology. After nearly half his first month's wages were withheld, he teamed up with Lin Xiaowen, a college student, and Zhao Tiezhu, an old factory hand, to fight for their rights. They discovered that the factory was squeezing workers out of their hard-earned wages through layers of middlemen at Zhongcheng Labor Services: falsifying attendance records, inflating work hours, and withholding social security contributions.

During their investigation, Yang Zhiqiang nearly got fired, Lin Xiaowen was kidnapped and threatened, and Zhao Tiezhu uncovered a worker's fall from a building five years earlier that had been covered up. With help from undercover reporter Zhang Feng and public-interest lawyer Li Jing, they obtained crucial evidence: a financial USB drive documenting the flow of tens of millions in illicit funds.

As their campaign for justice attracted media attention, Wang Zhenkun, deputy general manager of Xin Hui, and Liu Jinbiao, a shady labor broker, began turning on each other. In the end, labor arbitration awarded more than twenty million yuan in compensation to three hundred workers, and the main culprits were sentenced to prison. After sending his compensation to his mother for medical treatment, Yang Zhiqiang and his companions established South China's first legal aid center for workers, continuing to shine a light of hope for laborers at the bottom of society.

(Adapted from real labor scam cases in the Pearl River Delta.)