120 million from countryside find work in cities

An estimated 120 million people originally from rural backgrounds have found employment in China's cities or in booming coastal areas far from their home provinces, a report released by the  Ministry of Labour and Social Security in May 2005 revealed. 

The statistics were included in a series of reports on migrant workers. In the first report, "The Current  Structure and Characteristics of the Migrant Population", it estimates that there are in total 120 million rural migrant workers in China and of these 100 million workers are working in the cities, with 60% of them taking up jobs in provinces outside their home province. The report says that 62% of the migrant workers seek jobs in the eastern provinces, 20% in the central provinces and 18% in the western provinces. The main provinces exporting workers are Anhui, Jiangxi, Sichuan, Hunan, Hubei, Henan, Guangxi, Chongqing and Guizhou.

The same report also revealed that the average age of migrant workers is 29: About 45% of the total are between the ages of 16 and 25 and 61% are under 30. Migrant workers are generally poorly educated: 83% of them have junior secondary school education or less, and 72% of the migrant workers have never received any occupational training.

Source: 14 Aug 2005, China Youth Daily

Labour arbitration committees heft massive workload

The Labour Dispute Arbitration Committee in historic Xi'an City only has the manpower to handle a fraction of the cases brought to it each year, the committee revealed in a mid-year report.

The committee has been presented with about 60,000 complaints a year in recent years. Of these about 6,000 will pursue their cases through the municipal arbitration system. However the Xi'an committee only has the capacity to handle 1,000 cases, about one-tenth of the real need.The Labour disputes arbitration committee were set up as a labour-administrative department in 1987, and t has found itself receiving more and more complaints.

Source: 26 July 2005, Shaanxi Workers' Daily

Occupational health and safety problems climbing in the private sector

Preliminary figures on safety in the work place in 2004 reveal that there were 9,864 industrial accidents in privately-owned mines and factories in which 11,278 workers were killed, These figures represented 67% and 68% of all accidents and fatalities nation-wide and this is a significant increase over 2003 figures, Wang Dexue, deputy administrator of the State Administration of Work Safety, told the media in July 2005.

While the statistics were labeled "incomplete", they showed that 8,713 industrial accidents occurred the privately owned mines and factories in China in 2003, in which a total of 9,708 workers were killed. This accounted for 65% and 66% of the total number of work-related accidents and fatalities in the country.

Statistics from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention show that 83% of township enterprises present work environments with varying degrees of occupational hazards; about 34% of the workers in these enterprises are affected by harmful levels of dust and toxic substances. As a result, about 15.78% of workers in township enterprises develop or are suspected of developing various occupational illnesses. About 37.2% of the foreign-invested factories were shown to have hazardous conditions with 34.7% of workers employed in these plants in the danger of developing occupational illnesses.

Source: 21 July 2005, China Work Safety News

China intends to standardize compensation for industrial injuries

China is planning to standardize compensation paid to workers hurt or killed in industrial accidents, with the maximum payment set at the equivalent of 20 years of wages, the State Administration of Work Safety announced.

The government may introduce a clause in current laws stating  If the employer is found fully responsible for the industrial accident, the maximum compensation would be equivalent to the total wages of the injured/deceased worker for 20 years. The pay-out would be based on the enterprise's average wages for the previous year. In October 2004, Shanxi provincial government released a regulation stipulating that the compensation paid to the family of each deceased miner should not be less than 200,000 yuan. In the past, each bereaved family would only be given a compensation of 20,000 to 50,000 yuan.

Source: 18 Feb 2005, Information Times

Private sector wages, benefits inferior to state enterprises

Wage rates in the private sector are lower than those in state-owned enterprises, according to a survey conducted by a group of party and government agencies. The survey which was based on full year figures for 2003 showed that the average annual salary, including bonus and dividends, of a worker in a privately-held company was 8,033 yuan, while an employee in a state enterprise received 14,577 yuan a year and a worker in a collectively-owned enterprise earned 8,678 yuan. The same survey also revealed that a private entrepreneur's average annual income was 202,000 yuan, while the median was 60,000 yuan.

Only 33.4% of private enterprises provided their staff with medical insurance, only 8.7% offered pension plans and just 16.6% had unemployment insurance, the survey revealed. In addition, the insured staff members were mostly those in senior management positions or technical staff. Most of the rank and file generally did not receive any of these benefits, the survey showed. Only 14.5% of the workers interviewed were covered by medical insurance, while only 22.7% and 6% of the workers had pension and unemployment insurance.

The survey was conducted and supported by leading central government organisations and think tanks, including the United Front Department of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) Central Committee, Propaganda Department of the CCP Central Committee, All-China Federation of Industry & Commerce, State Administration of Industry and Commerce, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, All-China Society of Private Economy Research in 2004.

Source: 3 Feb 2005, China News Services

Compiled by the China Labour Bulletin on 13 September 2005