Mainland Media

Collective Labour Disputes Continue to Rise in Beijing

(April 19th 2004)

The following is a summary translation of an article from the Beijing Youth Daily published on 7 February 2005. It concerns the release of official statistics from the capital’s Labour Disputes and Arbitration Committees and reveals an increase both collective labour disputes and the number of workers involved in them.

Collective Labour Disputes Continue to Rise in Beijing

Beijing’s Labour Disputes and Arbitration Committees dealt with a total of 15,928 individual and collective cases in 2004. Most of the cases were concerned with disputes over wages, social insurance, working hours, rest days and enterprise restructuring. The Beijing Labour and Social Security Bureau provided the following summary based on the available data:

• Collective disputes are rising rapidly. Most involve migrant rural workers from other parts of China. In 2004, there were 701 collective disputes in the city (up 35% on 2003) involving 7,899 workers, an increase of 29% on the previous year. Collective disputes increased faster than individual cases. Most of the collective disputes occurred in township and village enterprises located in the suburbs of the capital and are rooted in the non-payment of wages and social insurance. Wages arrears in the construction industry remained especially serious and led to 252 collective disputes involving 3,043 rural migrant workers.
  
• There was a decrease in labour disputes in state-owned enterprises and these accounted for just 19% of all disputes.
  
• Disputes in joint-ventures and privately-owned enterprises continued to rise and accounted for 44% of the total labour disputes in Beijing.