|
It is useful to note that these changes took place over a decade or more and stand in stark contrast to what happened in the former USSR which was subjected to a big-bang version of privatisation following the collapse in 1991. Nevertheless, when they did come in China, the impact of the mass redundancies was devastating. Xiagang moved on to the political and economic agenda in 1993 when the State Council released the Regulations on the Placement of Surplus Staff and Workers of State Owned Enterprises. The former Ministry of Labour – now the Ministry of Labour and Social Security (MOLSS) – launched pilot ‘re-employment projects’ in 30 cities in 1994, and then expanded the experience to other areas of the country. After more than a decade in the wings of the Chinese economy, the forces of globalisation began their not-so-long march towards the centre stage. The first wave of redundancies took place between 1995 and 1997 with a pause for breath for the 15th Party Congress in 1997. The Congress agreed to strengthen and deepen the restructuring process and called for further increases in SOE efficiency and competitiveness. The lay-offs continued with renewed vigour as millions of mostly middle-aged workers found themselves relocated from the formal state sector to an informal private sector in which they had to compete for jobs with migrants from the countryside. The sense of shock was almost as traumatic as the descent into poverty. As an inquiry into the conditions and support networks of laid off women in the city of Chengdu pointed out:
“The social position of former SOE women workers was profoundly weakened by xiagang. This group differs from other vulnerable social groups, such as migrant workers from the farms, or those urban dwellers who have never been attached to any work unit or enterprise. Far from being on the margins of urban society, these women were, prior to xiagang, at the core of the old production system – the masters of the country’s [enterprises].”
The government attempted to soften the blow by promoting re-employment (zai jiuye). Restructuring SOEs were obliged to set up re-employment centres offering retraining courses sometimes run by the trade union. According to the State Council’s Notice on Securing Basic Living Standards and Re-employment of SOE Laid Off Workers, a laid off worker could not remain in the re-employment service centre for more than three years. Labour relations with the enterprise were to be terminated after this period. If he or she was still out of work, formal registration as unemployed was then required in order to receive welfare benefits. These are paid for a maximum of two years. Some municipal governments have encouraged unemployed and laid off workers to stop ‘relying on the government’ and seek jobs for themselves, chiefly in the service industries and private sector. In April 1995, the then Ministry of Labour initiated the Re-employment Programme which instructs local governments to provide information on job markets, skills-training, probationary employment schemes, and to encourage self-help projects. Recent research conducted by the MOLSS for the ILO has cited examples of good practice in Shanghai involving ‘informal labour organisations’ where the term is used to describe groups of laid off workers who “individually or in groups provide various temporary labour to the community, such as catering services, street cleaning and other forms of public labour to enterprises or institutions as a means of making a living when they cannot (or conditions do not permit them to) establish employment relationships with the organisations employing them”.
The other side of the formal-informal tension has been a rapid expansion of the private sector. Much has been written in ALU and other publications on the very poor conditions that exist, for the most part, in these workplaces where the vast majority of employees are internal migrants from the countryside. Suffice here to remind readers of the degree that the absence of effective trade union protection and the willingness of governments at all levels to prioritise the interests of capital over labour have contributed to the informalisation of work. Recent years have seen the emergence of labour shortages in many areas and market forces have obliged, for example, the Guangdong provincial government to raise the minimum wage twice in Shenzhen – perhaps China’s most important SEZ – in order to attract labour. These and similar measures demonstrate the limits of authoritarian capital as far as the working class is concerned. Such decrees are always subject to varied implementation. They are no substitute for the right to organise, the right to strike, the right to collective bargaining, and other relevant rights that are traditionally associated with the formalized workplace practices in which workers can legitimately pursue collective class interests.
Conclusion
We hope that this paper has sufficiently summarized the role of both the state and capital in the process of informalisation of work in China; and in doing so has further demonstrated the close link between formal and informal employment and the labour relations they produce. We have, for the most part, bypassed the role labour law has played in the process. This aspect will be examined more closely in the follow-up paper in the next issue of ALU, which will concentrate on the role of labour protests in both resisting the negative impacts of informalisation and promoting its opposite: decent work.
One view of the informal sector
The ILO/ICFTU international symposium on the informal sector in 1999 proposed that the informal sector workforce can be categorised into three broad groups: (a) owner-employers of micro enterprises, which employ a few paid workers, with or without apprentices; (b) own-account workers, who own and operate one-person businesses, and who work alone or with the help of unpaid workers, generally family members and apprentices; and (c) dependent workers, paid or unpaid, including wage workers in micro enterprises, unpaid family workers, apprentices, contract labour, homeworkers, and paid domestic workers.
|
References
Books (in English unless stated)
- Industrial Relations and Labour Policies in a Globalising World, Editors: Chang Kai, Zheng Ningshuo, Qiao Jian, China Workers Press 2002 (Chinese)
- Choices: State-owned enterprises and the Workers’ Subsistence Action, Liu Aiyu, Social Science Academic Press (China) 2005 (Chinese)
- Globalisation and Labour the new ‘Great Transformation’, Ronald Munck, Zed Books, 2002
- The Mandate of Heaven, Marx and Mao in Modern China, Nigel Harris, Quartet Books 1978
- FDI and Labour in China: The actors and possibility of a new working class activism, Chang Dae-oup and Monina Wong in Asian Transnational Corporation Outlook 2004: Asian TNCs, workers, and the movement of capital, Asia Monitor Resource Centre, ATNC Monitoring Network Book Series, 2005
- Red Coal, Liu Qingbang, 2006 (Chinese)
Papers and Articles
- Skills development for the informal economy. Available at: www.ilo.org/public/english/employment/skills/informal/who.htm
- Chinese Workers and the WTO, Tim Pringle, available at: http://www.ihlo.org/archive/
- Skills training in the informal sector in China, ILO InFocus Programme on Skills, Knowledge and Employability (2002)
- China’s Employment Problems: Analysis and Solutions, Hu Angang, available at: http://iwep.org.cn/wec/english/articels/2001_o1/huangang.htm
- Causes, Implementation and Consequences of ‘Xiagang’, Tim Pringle and Apo Leong, Paper presented at the International Conference on Labour Relations and Labour Standards under Globalisation, 1-2 April 2006
Page : 1 2 3
|
|
|
