The law requires all employers to subsidize outdoor employees and those working indoors where the temperature is above 33 C.

Yet journalists in Wuhan in Central China's Hubei province recently found that some enterprises offered insufficient subsidies to their outdoor workers, lower than the provincial standard of 12 yuan ($1.8) a day; some even offered just a bottle of cola instead.

The insufficient high-temperature subsidies violate employees' rights.

Local labor rights protection departments said that those who get insufficient high-temperature subsidies can report it to them. But that is unlikely to happen as those who fail to receive the high-temperature subsidy they are entitled to are usually manual laborers, and if they report their employers to the government, they might lose their jobs.

In order to solve the problem, it is necessary for labor rights protection departments to be more proactive. They need to inspect enterprises and find out whether they are giving the high-temperature subsidy to their employees as they are legally required to do.

More importantly, the government must accelerate the ongoing reform and lighten the financial burden of small-and medium-sized enterprises, so that they can afford to issue the high-temperature subsidy as required by law.