MONTEGO BAY, St Jamaica — Chinese construction workers building the $43-million Western Children and Adolescent Hospital in Mount Salem, who complain that they have not been paid since the start of the year, say they had no choice but to temporarily walk off the job Wednesday because of mounting bills back home.

According to them, some are even at risk of losing their houses. Saying efforts to go through diplomatic channels have proved futile, they are hoping the protest will call attention to their plight.

“We all have children and the elderly at home and the loan on the house needs to be repaid,” one man said in a text message translated with a language app.

“The houses in our home may be forcibly withdrawn or auctioned and we will lose even more; now we just want to get our hard-earned money back to China. From January 2025 to now we have not been paid our work salary,” the text continued.

The text also suggested that they had appealed to the Chinese Embassy for help but no date was set for its intervention.

“We went to the embassy and the embassy said [it would] help mediate but there was not time to determine the mediation,” the translated message said.

On Wednesday morning the frustrated workers, mainly men, converged at the gates of the under-construction building. The words ‘No money, no work’ were prominently displayed on a makeshift sign of what appeared to be ply board painted in white and held in place with stilts.

At one point a man, who was identified as a supervisor, emerged from a section of the work site and addressed the gathering but that elicited angry reactions from workmen. The protestors were provided with verbal support from a number of Jamaicans passing by.

“Demand your money, yes!” said one woman who urged them to stand firm.

One local worker from the nearby Cornwall Regional Hospital (CRH) site sought to rally the troops by shouting the slogan from their sign, “No money, no work!”

When asked for a comment, on-site supervisors would only say they would be working to resolve the issue. The
Jamaica Observer also sought to get a comment from Minister of Health and Wellness Dr Christopher Tufton who was sworn in with other members of the Cabinet Wednesday. His one sentence reply noted that the construction workers were back on the job.

Located on the grounds of CRH, the 220-bed Western Children and Adolescent Hospital will provide medical services for children and adolescents up to 18 years old. It will also include a 60-room resident facility for health professionals from western Jamaica. Ground was officially broken on the seven-floor facility in October 2019 and it is expected to leverage synergies from operations at CRH. Billed as the first of its kind in the English-speaking Caribbean, the hospital is described on health ministry’s website as “a gift from the Government of the People’s Republic of China”.

Chinese workers at Western Children and Adolescent Hospital in Mount Salem put down their tools in protest Wednesday.