Workers

“Use the Law as Your Weapon!" Institutional Change and Legal Mobilization in China

Mary Gallagher (Assistant Professor, University of Michigan Department of Political Science)

“The Labor Law is a weapon to protect the rights of workers….” reads an excerpt from a page in the official workers’ newspaper heralding the second year of the law’s implementation. The page details new regulations, shows pictures of child workers in a Yunnan mine, has a write-in advice column for disgruntled workers, and information about a legal aid center for workers. Exhorting workers to “use the law as a weapon” is an apt and ironic phrase for this new emphasis on legal institutions. It reflects both the new importance that the state places on law as well as the state of labor politics: increasingly contentious and even violent (hence the need for a weapon).

In the past several years labor disputes in China have risen at an exponential rate. In 1994, 19,098 disputes occurred. The year-on-year rate jumped by 73% in 1995, 46% in 1996, 49% in 1997, and 31% in 1998. In 2002 labor disputes reached an all-time high of over 180,000. This increase took place in tandem with rapid changes in industrial relations, a boom in foreign direct investment, important legal reforms, and a renewed commitment to state enterprise reform/privatization by the central leadership. In this context, increasing contentiousness is perhaps not a complete surprise, though contentiousness that emerges as legal mobilization is intriguing in a regime characterized by underdeveloped legal institutions and an incomplete commitment to the rule of law. Such a growth in legal mobilization also seems at odds with much current analysis of the Chinese legal system, which depicts it as weak, easily corrupted, and subservient to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

This chapter argues that varying rates of legal mobilization across different types of firms is partly explained by patterns of legal and institutional change, and in particular by how new labor laws have been written. That is, despite widespread pessimism about the enforcement of Chinese laws, laws matter greatly for how disputes arise and how disputes are resolved. We must thus pay attention to how China’s burgeoning labor legislation has shaped the individual and collective action of workers while serving to mobilize or restrict their mobilization. For some types of disputes and some types of workers, wider legal channels and greater recourse to legal institutions have resulted. Yet, at the same time, the transition to a “rule of law” and contract labor relations has delegitimized the moral grievances of a large majority of the Chinese workforce, in particular those of state-owned enterprise (SOE) workers.

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