China's Labour Law, adopted 12 years ago, should be revised to ensure the rights and benefits of more than 100 million rural migrant workers, Chinese legislators have urged.

The law, adopted in 1994 and put into force at the beginning of 1995, lacked specific articles concerning migrant workers, in particular those rural labourers who have taken up non-agricultural jobs in China's booming cities, and thus did not effectively protect their legal rights and interests, said Hua Yan, a delegate to the Tenth National People's Congress (NPC) which ended its ten-day annual session in Beijing on Tuesday.

All households in China are registered as either rural or non-rural and all members of each household carry that designation on their identification cards. Rural migrant workers are those who have a rural household registration but are working in urban areas with domestic or internal work permits issued by local labour authorities.

China's Labour Law, enacted during the initial period of the market economy, did not cover new problems and conflicts that have arisen in the labour market in recent years, said Jiang Wanqiu, a delegate from Anhui province, one of destinations for migrant workers.

Rural migrant employees in some textile plants in five provinces including Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Hebei, worked about 12 hours a day but never received overtime pay, said Hua, citing an investigation he had made.

Rural migrant workers were underpaid and suffered a high rate of casualties at work, said Hua, adding that in Baokang County in Hubei province 248 were killed and 344 others were injured in the workplace over the past three years.

China's central authority has demanded greater protection of rural workers' rights and interests in many official documents, but little substantive change would occur without codifying those instructions in the Labour Law, Hua said.

Other delegates to the congress also stressed the need for action. In a report carried by the China Daily, one delegate called for the drafting of a new law to protect migrant workers' rights, including penalties for delaying payment of wages and discrimination against these workers.

According to statistics issued by the Ministry of Labour and Social Security for 2002, there were 13,000 cases involving 6.26 million workers who had suffered delays or deductions in wages. In all the workers were owed a total of 350 million yuan (about US$43.2 million) in back wages.

The Ministry of Agriculture last year estimated that Chinese farmers would migrate to the nation's cities at a rate of 8.5 million a year over the next 10 years, and that the total migrant population would reach 300 million in 20 years.

Sources: Xinhua News Agency (13 March 2006), China Daily (13 March 2006)

14 March 2006