A Study On Employment Discrimination Against Peasant Workers In The Transformation Of China

The rural - urban transfer of labour force is an important problem for developing countries during their industrialization and civilization. Based on migration theory, this paper mainly focuses on employment discrimination against peasant workers in the economic transformation of China.With the reform of China economy and the broken-up of rural and urban segregation, peasant has gone out from countries and come to cities to look for work on a large scale. This phenomenon is not only the inevitable results of economic development and institutional transformation, but also the demonstration that the economic reform has not been in end. Because of the path dependence of institution transformation, rural and urban dual structures have not completely been broken up. Peasant workers are met with a serious employment discrimination and exclusion in cities. They can"go out from country", but cannot"settle down in cities", and consequently become a weak group. This has become the"bottleneck"for development of society and has hampered the growth of economy.The employment discrimination against peasant workers has three forms: discrimination on work opportunity, on income and on rights and interest guarantee, this paper has tried to construct the economic model and applied many methods to examine the employment discrimination based on the social background of rigid rural urban dual structure in institution transformation. The current researches on this topic only simply focus on description of the employment discrimination; however this paper has put attention to the interest structure, institution sources, economic and social influence of the employment discrimination, and then gives some polices about this topic.Research on discrimination of employment opportunity shows the fundamental motivation that the government makes discrimination policy is to protect the local employment. But this institution arrangement is not Perato optimal, and then the current policy cannot get its target. Furthermore, from the point of view of labor market theory, employment discrimination will result in"prisoner dilemma", and this will form stickiness of informal employment in city.Research on discrimination of employment income has proved the assumption of income institutional stratification between peasant workers and city residents, Hukou and the property of working organization have marked effects on labor income. Employment discrimination against peasant workers also distorts the income-determining mechanism. The discrimination has made peasant workers only get such an unreasonable extent income that"shortage of peasant workers"has taken place in southeast of China.Research on discrimination of peasant workers'employment rights and interest has shown that the institutional source of current absence of protecting the peasant workers'employment rights and interests is the rigid rural urban dual structure in Chinese gradual economic transformation. Unfairness of economic system and exclusion of administration system increase risk of protecting peasant workers'rights and interests. Serious conflict between peasant workers and urban society is the direct result of discrimination of peasant workers'employment rights and interests. Hence, current practice to abate social conflict through popularizing knowledge of laws among peasant workers is actually helpless to solve this realistic conflict. So institution arrangement must be adjusted.Further analysis of inherent relation and action mechanism among peasant workers'discrimination institution arrangement (including formal institution arrangement, that is, peasant workers'institutional discrimination, and informal institution arrangement, that is, peasant workers'acceptable exclusion ), multilayer deprivation and city poverty shows that discrimination institution arrangement against peasant workers induces multilayer deprivation of peasant workers, and directly leads to and aggravates poverty of peasant workers.Based on institutional sources of employment discrimination against peasant worker, some policies are recommended in order to solve the problem. Generally speaking, it is to set up new institution for more provision of institution to protect peasant workers. The policies are in detail: firstly, peasant workers should be endowed with opportunities and incomes equal to urban residents through economic reform exerted by government; secondly, measures must be taken to provide proper education and training for peasant workers in order to enhance their working abilities; finally, measures must be implemented to break up the rural urban segregation of labor market, in order to improve the integration of the labor market.Of course, institution reform and system innovation are complex and arduous, and cannot be accomplished in an action. It needs breaking up current unreasonable interest structure, restructuring the current institute structure, and at the same time, establishing the new system of institution. Only in this way can that policy be established,performed and implemented efficiently.