Study On Migrant Workers' Rights And Interests Under The Financial Crisis

At the press conference of the Third Session of the Eleventh National People's Congress, Premier Wen Jiabao points out that "true economics and noble ethics cannot be separated", as well as "the poor and the vulnerable group should be paid close attention to". The special group formed by migrant workers is emerged in the process of tense industrialization and urbanization of our country. Migrant workers have made great contributions to our country's economical and social development. However, migrant workers have become the group of people who are marginalized by urban community, because they are treated unfairly and deprived of necessary rights ever since they flowed into the city. And one of the problems earnestly needed to be solved in our country is how to ensure migrant workers' legal rights.This paper analyzes the highlighted problems with protection of migrant workers' rights with large amount of investigation, as well as labor market and employment, the structure guide lines. Besides, the paper takes migrant workers' dynamic working process, which mainly focuses on migrant workers'legal rights in job choosing and labor protection, as a breakthrough point. Especially, this paper reveals an international prospective of researching into the impact of financial crisis on maintaining migrant workers'rights and benefits, through comparison of migrant workers' rights status among the year 2006 and years before.With all the collected data, the paper analyzes reasons why migrant workers' rights have been crippled. First, dualistic nature in terms of urban-rural division sets up resistance for migrant workers' free migration, which put migrant workers in a disadvantageous position that has inherent deficiencies in legal rights protection. Second, the existing financial system, containing geographical division and central-local fiscal revenue separation, will inevitably result in urbanization and localization of social public goods and shortage in public goods distribution for migrant workers. Third, designing deficiencies in present law system enables employers'taking advantage of migrant workers, which aggravates the risk of workers'rights being infringed upon. In addition, lax enforcement and weak penalties indulge employers in above-mentioned torts. Forth, unequal relationship in terms of huge gap between costs for employer'violating the laws and that for migrant workers' upholding their legal rights is one of the most important reasons why workers' rights and benefits cannot be safeguarded effectively. Fifth, lack of government management and failure in functional transformation both impact maintenance of migrant workers' rights and benefits. Sixth, low amount of human capital in migrant workers results in weak awareness of rights protection, ignorance in laws and regulations, as well as low degree of organizing each other together. And these are all the reasons why migrant workers cannot have adequate power to defend their rights and benefits.Based on analysis above, this paper puts forward five pieces of advice to protect migrant workers'rights under the adverse circumstance of international financial crisis. First, government should promote reform of household registration system and build a unified labor market. Second, law system should be improved. Besides, legal procedures should be simplified. And synthesized cost for employers' behavior causing damage to migrant workers should be increased significantly. Third, government should establish a scientific evaluation index system and take the issue of migrant workers into account. Forth, specialized managing agency should be built to provide coordinative services for migrant workers. Fifth, related agencies should enforce vocational training for migrant workers to improve competency of migrant workers.