The Human Rights Protection Of China’s Rural Migrant Workers

With the rapid globalization and increasing economic exchanges between countries, China hasalready joined the global economic competition. As the largest manufacturing country in theworld, China·s advantage lies in its low-cost labor. To cut down cost, many transnationalenterprises transferred their manufacturing and processing industries to developing countries. As aresult, Chinese workers, especially migrant workers in the field of manufacturing, constructingand service industries suffered from various problems, namely low salary, insufficient welfare,bad working conditions and lack of security. Internationally, scholars defined this kind of work asprecarious work. How to protect workers from such work has become an important issue andattracted great attention from international community, especially in the field of human rightsprotection and labor rights protection. Currently, there are already documents which include laborrights protection as part of human rights protection. Regional human rights protectionorganizations in EU and America also attached great importance to precarious work and relatedhuman rights issues. However, though there exists large amount of cases concerning precariouswork in China, this issue is not extensively studied and has not aroused enough attention amongChinese scholars.The international community has been actively taking measures to regulate precarious work andprotect human rights of workers, both from the point of view of human rights protection and thatof workers· rights protection. However, China now is still highly in lack of protection towardsworkers, especially migrant workers. Therefore, the study of precarious work is essential. In fact,many migrant workers are undertaking precarious work, which are exactly the target of thisresearch. The working conditions they are in is corresponding to the characteristics of precariouswork from each facet. By researching into legislation and legal cases in regard to international anddomestic protection of human rights and labor rights protection in other countries, and effectiveprotection mechanisms, this paper will address issues concerning the improvement of legislation,judiciary and the law enforcement, China·s legal system construction, human rights protection andthe improvement of workers· living and working conditions. Hence, under the above framework,this thesis aims to analyze the definition and denotation of precarious work, the relationshipbetween human rights and workers· rights protection as well as the human rights related toprecarious work. This thesis will also study into cases of the sweat factoryμ in China, fromperspectives of migrant workers· personal characteristics, their actual situations, and the currentlegislation in China. Issues in regard to existing international human rights conventions andprotection mechanism, regional human rights documents, international legal cases in human rightsprotection, legislations in foreign countries will also be discussed. This thesis will also proposeeffective solutions to protect human rights of workers, especially migrant workers in China, so asto improve the working conditions of workers in China and to reduce the number of workers in precarious condition. Ultimately, this thesis aims to protect human rights and labor rights ofworkers, and to promote the development of human rights protection and legal system in China.