- Man says his pay packet takes a hit every time cabbies flick butts onto the street
- Zhengzhou city management says supervisors are too zealous with staff fines
The man blamed littering on unauthorised taxi drivers who throw cigarette ends into the street.
“These black cab drivers come here every day, again and again. They never stop coming here,” the cleaner was quoted as saying.
Pear Video spoke to other street cleaners in Zhengzhou, who confirmed that they were fined 7 yuan per cigarette butt found after cleaning.
“[Management patrol] will say things like this because they want to supervise the street cleaners. But there are no detailed written guidelines, and this was never formally implemented,” a representative from the Zhengzhou City Management Command Centre was quoted as saying in the report.
“It is just for the purpose of verbal supervision and encouragement.”
The Zhengzhou official said the centre would investigate further and speak to the street cleaners about fines.
The video stirred up angry reactions on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform.
“When [Pear Video] investigated they say it hasn’t been implemented. If they didn’t investigate, they would have just carried on giving fines,” read one comment that attracted more than 17,000 likes.
Street cleaners in China often earn meagre salaries for gruelling manual labour for long periods of time.
Last month, it emerged that more than 500 street cleaners in the city of Nanjing were ordered to wear GPS tracking bracelets that would alert authorities if they stayed in the same place for more than 20 minutes. The manufacturer removed the feature after a backlash inside and outside China.
Source: SCMP
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