Migrant Workers In Urban Labor Markets Has Been The Extent Of Discrimination?

Previous researches have showed the discrimination against migrant workers can generate some welfare to the local labor at the sacrifices of even greater loss to the migrant workers, consumers, enterprises and the whole social welfare at large. In a word, discrimination in the urban labor market has impaired the fair competition and the efficiency as well, making negative effects on the economic developments and social stabilities.In this paper, theoretical and practical researches have been conducted to analyze the problems of migrant workers suffering discrimination in urban labor markets. Taking reference on the data in 2001 and 2005, we have introduced the Mincer Function to carry out a through analysis on the Hukou system discrimination issues by taking account of the three basic funds in calculation. As the results revealed, migrant workers are undergoing great discriminations in the urban labor markets and the problems even worsen when the three basic funds are included. Furthermore, the degrees of discrimination varies in our sampled cities as Shanghai, Wuhan, Fuzhou, Shenyang and Xian, while Wuhan leads in the 5 cities followed by Shanghai; Discrimination problems get worst in the state-owned and foreign enterprises among the three major sub-labor categories as single businessman and collective business, private-owned company, state-owned and foreign enterprises; Different industries(6 main industries studied in this paper including agriculture, manufacture, service, communication and transportation, public service, finance and others) have experienced different discrimination, with lower discrimination grade in three pillar industries namely agriculture, manufacture and service when 3 basic funds excluded. And year 2005 sees higher discrimination level than the year 2001 in Shanghai when counting in the three basic funds during the corresponding periods.