China Labour Bulletin appears in the following article. Copyright remains with the original publisher.
China's Migrants Face Discrimination, Amnesty Says (Update1)
2007-03-01 03:35 (New York)
By Dune Lawrence
March 1 (Bloomberg) -- China's household registration system continues to deprive the nation's 200 million migrant workers from rural areas of labor contracts and their children of education, Amnesty International said in a report today.
The requirement for local residence papers also undermines the development of a skilled workforce and leads to employee turnover, according to Corinna-Barbara Francis, who wrote the report, released today.
"Because these people are transient and forced to be more transient than they might otherwise be, there's not as much investment in skills," Francis said in an interview. "A lot of enterprises have a problem finding skilled labor."
China, which ratified an International Labour Organization convention banning discrimination based on workers' backgrounds last year, hasn't replaced the registration system. The country faces a shortage of skilled workers with just one applicant for every 1.5 jobs available in 2006 in southern Guangdong province,
according to Xinhua news agency.
For every new worker hired in the province last year, 0.73 employee quit, Xinhua said. The situation may worsen in 2007, with demand for ordinary workers expected to climb 9.5 percent and demand for skilled workers rising 20 percent, it said.
Every resident of China must register with their local Public Security Bureau, under the "hukou" system introduced in the 1950s. Anyone living away from their hukou area for more than three months must get a temporary residence permit, often
required to work, rent a home or open a bank account. Most migrant workers don't have the employment contracts, police character references or other documents needed to apply.
Bad for Business
The system has "led to a very mobile labor force, a very high level of staff turnover, and that's bad for business," said Robin Munro, research director at China Labour Bulletin, a Hong-Kong based group focusing on workers rights. "It's dysfunctional for the economy, increasingly so as China moves out of the cheap mass-production model into higher value-added type activities."
The hukou system forces many migrants to work illegally because they can't change their official status, leaving them without access to public services. Their children inherit rural registration, making them ineligible for free compulsory
education where they live.
"It really is an inherited caste system," Amnesty's Francis said. The hukou system "brands a group of people in a very powerful way, and conditions their experience and their rights and the benefits they can get."
No Benefits
Without legal status, migrants fall prey to exploitation by employers, who enforce mandatory overtime and withhold wages, according to the report. In southern China, where internal migrants make up the majority of the labor force, workers clock 12 to 14 hours a day with only one day off a month, it said.
Many migrant children are shut out of the nine years of free education promised by law either because their parents aren't registered or because they're assessed extra fees by local schools, the Amnesty report said. Education bureaus often close private schools set up for migrant children, it said.
Even migrants with temporary hukou permits don't qualify for benefits such as subsidized health care, the report said.
"China's hukou system has often been compared to the Apartheid system in pre-democracy South Africa," China Labour Bulletin's Munro said. "It's a rigid system designed to keep the rural population out of the cities except where their presence is absolutely required for local economic development."
Influx
While the Amnesty report calls for an end to discrimination based on place of origin and for the provision of social services to migrants on an equal basis, some experiments with hukou changes have created problems.
Zhengzhou, capital of central China's Henan province, in 2003 let more migrants register and receive welfare benefits, only to cancel the policy a year later after an influx of 150,000 people, the China Daily reported in September 2004.
The surge of new residents overburdened the transportation system, forced schools to install smaller desks to accommodate new students and prompted surges in crime and environmental problems, the newspaper said.
"You can't say that if you abolish the hukou, then rural people will benefit -- it's not that simple," said Xiong Wei, head of the Beijing Xin Qimeng Citizen Legislative Participation Research Institute, a private legislative-issues research group.
"In Beijing, if you offered equal access to schools for rural workers, you could have a large number of migrant children coming in," Xiong said. "Schools' resources are limited and might not be able to handle so many people."
More Changes
Macquarie Securities Ltd. economist Paul Cavey said that
while free movement of workers would help solve China's labor-
market problems, changes to the hukou system alone aren't enough.
"It's only one part of the problem of trying to get a better labor market functioning," Hong-Kong based Cavey said. More changes must be made to the rural economy, including increasing peasants' land rights, he said.
China's government is aware that officials and other people have violated workers' rights, and is seeking to remedy abuses, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said at a regular briefing today in Beijing.