China to End Inequities to Rural Migrant Workers

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, August 08, 2002

China to End Inequities to Rural Migrant Workers

For millions of rural migrant workers driven to the cities by their yearning for a better and more modern life, what has happened in the small and obscure Yancheng city might be the start of a revolution which will completely change their destiny.

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Urban citizenship, social security coverage, a pension after retirement - for Peng Juan, a 34-year-old rural migrant worker in central China's Henan province, these are just wonderful but remote dreams.

This year however her dreams have come true. With new policies adopted by the government of Yancheng county, where Peng has lived for the past four years, all migrant workers from rural areas are now being given the same treatment as their urban compatriots.

This means they can get a Hukou, or permanent urban residence permit, just by proving that they are employed, choose whatever occupation they want and join the city's medical, pension and other insurance schemes. Their children will also be accepted and treated similarly to urban kids by local schools.

"For me it's like a pie falling from the sky," said an overjoyed Peng, who was recently hired by the Rikang Company, a booming local private enterprise. In the past she could only subsist on odd jobs, as under the old policies "good enterprises only wanted to hire urbanites".

For millions of rural migrant workers driven to the cities by their yearning for a better and more modern life, what has happened in the small and obscure Yancheng city might be the start of a revolution which will completely change their destiny.

The bold "reform experiment", as the local government in Yancheng puts it, has been sanctioned and backed by key central government ministries including the Ministry of Labor and Social Security and the State Development Planning Commission. Similar "experiments" are also underway in 15 other counties across China.

This reform is intended to abolish all discriminative policies leading to inequality in employment for laborers of urban and rural origins, establish a unified employment system for urban and rural labor, and draw migrant workers into the social security system, said Wang Aiwen, an official with the Ministry of Labor and Social Security.

There are currently more than 80 million rural migrant workers in China, most of whom have swarmed into the cities in the past decade since the government started to replace the decades-old planned economy with a stark new market economy.

But many migrant laborers have had bitter experiences in their urban lives: their job opportunities have usually been restricted to the most dirty and back-breaking work scorned by city dwellers, and they have often been underpaid and have always been excluded from the social security systems all Chinese cities are now establishing.

Before the reform, migrant workers in Yancheng were even not allowed to sign labor contracts longer than one year and local enterprises were frequently advised to leave better jobs to urban laid-off workers, said Zhou Qifang, the deputy county magistrate. Migrant workers also had to pay a variety of fees, and the so-called "urban accommodation and management fee" rose to over 400 RMB yuan (about 50 US dollars) a year per head.

"Now the situation has completely changed and both the migrant workers and local enterprises welcome the change," said Zhou.

Tian Xinmin, deputy general manager of the Rikang Company, said the reform has greatly simplified the procedure for hiring a rural laborer and enabled his company to recruit really competent workers. Now more than 70 percent of the company's 400-strong employees are rural migrant workers.

The reform in Yancheng has removed the "identity gap" between urban and rural citizens and offered them an equal playing field in employment, thus reflecting the principles of "equality" and "fair play" stressed by the society after China's entry into the World Trade Organization, said Shi Maosheng, president of the Zhengzhou University law school.

Meanwhile, the reform has also found a "safe passage" for China's huge force of rural surplus labor, an issue the Chinese government has to tackle very carefully in the country's road to modernization, Shi noted.

With a rural population of over 900 million, China has the world's largest rural surplus labor force, which experts say could reach 200 million by 2005.

Officials from the Ministry of Labor and Social Security hinted that China might be thinking of using its cities, especially those newly-developed small cities and towns, as a potential channel for the diversion of the surplus rural labor.

"The thriving of the non-public sectors and the mushrooming of small cities and towns have made the time ripe to form a unified labor market in China," said Wang. "And we hope a breakthrough can first be achieved in some small and medium-sized cities."

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