1. Introduction
China’s Labor Contract Law (Laodong Hetong Fa; henceforth LCL) came into effect in January 2008 as one of the most important reforms of her labor market regulation. While the law is celebrated for its comprehensive protection for the employed, it also gives ri to a variety of controversies over its economic impacts ranging from increasing costs of labor for enterpris to rising unemployment both in business and academic communities. In addition to the controversies over the LCL's potential economic impacts, the passage of the LCL was a puzzle to many students of China’s political economy.
In the first place, while China has always claimed herlf to be a “socialist” market economy since the economic reform began, workers, especially migrant workers from the rural areas, have been experiencing extremely tough working conditions without proper channels for addressing their grievances. Within China’s political system, they also fail to have a strong advocate to reprent their interests and fight for their rights. The passage of the LCL thus marks as a surpri to everyone not becau it is not timely enough but becau China’s political system did not have any fundamental transformation to have the voice of this previously dinfranchid population suddenly heard in the political arena loud and clear. As a result, how can we account for this sudden move by t
he Chine government in favor of the working class?
Secondly, this sudden move ems to run against the long experimentalist tradition in China. China has been widely praid for its gradualist approach to economic reform where almost every significant institutional change is experimented in lected localities
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鹿特丹大学worn the unemployment rates?
As the discussions around the LCL are coming to an end in the Chine society for lack of any signals from the central government to rescind it, this paper eks to explore systematically the policymaking process of the LCL and to identify the caus for adoption or rejection of the LCL by Chine policymakers.
初学者怎么学韩语The paper proceeds as follows. In ction 2, we describe the lawmaking process of the LCL and identify the actors who are involved. Section 3 analyzes the labor contract system in terms of experimentalism. We analyze the political economy of the LCL and provide our explanations on the implementation of the LCL in Section 4. We argue that the LCL was pasd not becau the pro-labor forces suddenly had their way in the Chine politics, but becau the LCL is going to facilitate the industrial upgrading in China. We conclude the paper in Section 5 by suggesting that rising unemployment caud by the LCL has made the Chine government consider to slow down the speed of economic upgrading.
toddlerdavidjones2. Making the Labor Contract Lawmaskchina
The labor contract system (laodong hetongzhi) was implemented nationwide in 1986 to replace the ir
on-rice system when the urban unemployment rates skyrocketed due to the return of youth who were nt out to the countryside during the Culture Revolution. Along with the concerns of unemployment, the Chine policymakers also started to recognize that the iron-rice bowl system would highly contribute to low labor productivity. The ideal of the labor contract system is to reduce state administrative
performancescontrol on labor allocation, and to give firms the rights to recruit their own workers according to their requirements. Since the new system is implemented, new employees can only been hired by signing contracts with his/her enterpri, and the renewal of the labor contract is suppod to only depend on worker's performance (White 1987,
泽穗希369-70). The new system marked a breakthrough point of China’s labor market reform. The initial steps of the reform were modest, however. Since the “Reform and Open Door” policy was announced in 1978, until 1994 when the first Labor Law (Laodong Fa; henceforth LL) was promulgated, there had been more than 160 labor regulations and rules issued by the government (Ngok 2008, 49). But it was only until 1994 that workers on contracts rod rapidly (Brooks and Tao 2003, 16).
The process to introduce the labor contract system first and to make the LL later reveals that in China, policy always comes first, and then law follows. Only tho policies that have been experimented successfully can be codified into law (Ngok 2008, 48). The LL is the first codified legal framework regulating China’s labor market, but the claus dealing with labor contacting are all simple. Right after the LL was enacted, efforts to make a national law on labor contract started (Cooney et al. 2007, 2). The initial work by the Legislative Affairs Office of the State Council were, however, not continued becau the former Premier ZHU Rongji considered the restructuring of state-owned enterpris (SOEs) and layoff policy to be the priorities at that time3.
In the 90s, the labor policy regime was characterized by the prevalence of varieties of regulations. The LL provides a general legal framework while many administrative regulations were issued to deal with the implementation. The regulations are moreganda
互换性3 Informant 1, member of the Legislative Affairs Office of the State Council. Interview conducted on March 15, 2008.
