Bazhong 12345 Hotline Wage Complaints Resolved, Officials Say

On September 24, a post on the Wenzheng Sichuan citizen petition platform alleged that the Bazhong 12345 citizen service hotline, in the Sichuan city of Bazhong, had failed to pay its employees’ July and August wages. The poster described monthly pay of just over 2,000 yuan and said delays were frequent, according to Chinese-language reports that carried the complaint, including an article republished on NetEase that credits the Huashang Bao investigative desk Dafeng News.

The Bazhong 12345 hotline exists, in principle, to help residents pursue unpaid wages. This autumn, it became the subject of a wage complaint of its own.

What the city says happened

On October 8, the Bazhong Municipal Bureau of Business Environment and Data replied on the platform. It said wages for hotline staff are calculated and disbursed by the contractor that won the service procurement, and that labor contracts set pay on a piece-rate, next-month settlement basis: July wages due by the end of August, August wages by the end of September.

After checking, the bureau said, operator settlement had been slow and the disbursement cycle had stretched, so July wages had not been paid on time. August wages, it said, were paid in full to employees’ personal accounts on September 29. Following coordination, the operator committed to paying the July wages in full by mid-October, according to the reply as reported by China.com.

A 4.8-million-yuan contract and a pay dispute

The hotline is a government-purchased service project. Procurement records cited in the reports show that China Telecom’s Bazhong branch won the contract on August 28, 2025, with a bid amount of 4.8 million yuan and a service term of 1,095 days. Tender documents cited an annual fiscal budget of 5 million yuan and 15 million yuan over three years, and required an operations center of 71 staff, with an average comprehensive expenditure of 61,000 yuan per person per year, about 5,083 yuan per person per month.

Staff at the Municipal Government Services and Public Resources Trading Service Center, an institution under the bureau, told reporters that the claim of frequent delays was not accurate and amounted to an emotional expression. The center’s headcount fluctuates around 70, they said, with departures and new hires every month, and operators are on performance-based pay. Not every operator earns just over 2,000 yuan, they said; some take home 3,000 to 4,000 yuan a month. A finance professional with years of experience at a state-owned enterprise, asked by reporters to estimate, put likely take-home pay after social insurance deductions at around 3,100 yuan a month, a personal estimate rather than official data.

City says wages paid in full; commentary asks why

On the evening of October 8, Bazhong authorities told reporters that, after coordination by relevant municipal departments, the wage arrears had been fully paid by the operator, China Telecom’s Bazhong branch. That is the authorities’ own account; no employee or union confirmation has been published.

The head of the Bazhong 12345 hotline management office said the office would draw lessons from the episode, improve wage disbursement management, and tighten daily supervision to prevent recurrence. The China Telecom Bazhong branch said it would fulfill its contractual responsibility to pay operators’ wages on time and in full.

The episode also drew media commentary: a 12345 hotline that helps everyone else pursue unpaid wages should not need media attention to pursue its own, commentators argued, and slow operator settlement cannot excuse a gap in wage oversight.

The complaint and the official reply, as they appear here, come from media transcriptions; the original platform posts were not directly verified for this article, and the two sides’ accounts of how often wages have run late remain unreconciled.