ABSTRACT

In the recent decade in China, labor conflicts have been on the rise across different industries such as the 2010 strike of Honda workers in South China. An increasing amount of public media exposure eliciting illicit employment practices have acted against the principles of labor rights. For minority groups such as low-skilled laborers and those who are inexperienced such as fresh graduates, they were more susceptible to certain negative impacts of both governmental policies and corporation employment policies. The objective of this paper is to uncover such differential impacts regarding rights in the context of employment from a systemic approach. Both social policy regarding Covid-19 and economic policy have some undesired impacts while impacts from contractionary monetary policy in the recent decade are considered less significant. Moreover, the inter-provincial “Dual-transfer” policy had its implementation strayed from the original plan regarding the settlement of low-skilled labor and resulted in greater regional inequality in Guangdong Province. From a local perspective, unjustifiable employment standards and the impotence of trade unions in defending labor rights have significant differential impacts on the low-skilled and the fresh graduates. Despite the status quo, the concept of reparative equality and changes in trade unions may be integrated into policy designing to ameliorate the situation by increasing risk-bearing ability.

Keywords: labor rights, low-skill labor, differential labor market impacts, policy outcome, out-of-school youth

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