Injury Migrant Workers: A Group Can't Be Empowered

At present, various kinds of legal protections and policy systems for migrant workers are more and more perfect, but migrant workers, especially injury migrant workers are still miserable. The attempt to empower this group has not changed the powerless peoples' actual conditions. They still have to drift from place to place on the road of safeguarding their rights.By focusing on the process of safeguarding the rights of injury migrant workers this paper has discovered that there is another process that is completely opposite to the empowerment in practice. There is a process of de-powerment. De-powerment refers to the fact that although the empowered group claimed on their rights nominally, they get caught into a completely opposite process of legalized deprivation in the practical process of struggling for their own rights and interests. The concept of legalized deprivation takes on the forms of institutional interlink in the operation of institutional practice. Institutional interlink refers to the fact that actors create institutional obstacles by employing the "bad" shifts and interlinks in the operating process of institutions. Accordingly, it may lead to a deliberate unmatchedness of institutions. Hence, the empowered group is forced to confront hopelessness and helplessness that are created by the institutional arrangement. Therefore, they are involved in an inescapable paradox in the process of safeguarding their own rights.This thesis mainly explored the internal logic and mechanism of the de-powering process. Specifically, the present research has analyzed four types of institutional interlinks, which are found in the operating process, including delegitimation, increase of the cost of safeguarding rights, the alternative usage of institutions and the weakening of social support. Based on this, the paper suggests that the institutional paradox concerning the safeguarding the rights and interests of injury migrant workers consists of the empowerment at the rhetoric level and the de-powerment at the practical level. A deep understanding of the institutional paradox should take into consideration the complex and subtle relationships among local power, capital and migrant workers, which are formed in the process of market transformation in China.