I Wonder How Much They Were Being Paid

The "war on terror" continues to be a miserable failure. An attack on a military convoy in Pakistan killed 11 and wounded several others, and at least 11 Chinese road workers were killed in northern Afghanistan. The men were among 100 Chinese engineers and construction workers who had recently arrived in Afghanistan to work on a World Bank road project on a road running north from Kabul to its northern border with Tajikistan.

Chinese laborers were extensively employed in building U.S. railroads and in the construction of the Panama Canal, both under conditions approaching slave labor. My guess would be that most of these workers were not being paid much, and I'm guessing they didn't have a good medical plan or vacations, either.