Zhejiang Tongxiang court building.
Recently, the city of Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province, released the “abnormal list of workers’ rights” through the official WeChat public number, informing the first Sichuan labor rights defender Hu who was on the list. The official move is said to leave workers with damaged interests with no way to complain.
Zhejiang Jiaxing Tongxiang City Court on February 7 informed that within a year, workers will be included in the “abnormal list of workers’ rights” if they ask for payment for 3 times or more in the same labor security supervision department or 5 times or more in different labor security supervision departments in the name of defaulted migrant wages. Other conditions for entering this list include a certain number of complaints, arbitration applications and lawsuits filed in the same labor security inspection department, labor arbitration court and court within three years. The abnormal workers on the list will be promptly notified to the labor intermediaries, talent market, industry associations, etc. Meanwhile, the local departments will scrutinize the cases in the labor inspection, arbitration, trial and other aspects of the abnormal workers’ rights.
The briefing shows that the “abnormal list of workers’ rights” is adjusted once a year, and those who have been included in the list will be removed from the list if they no longer meet the criteria. There are reports that this practice may be extended throughout China.
In response, netizens have said, “Let’s start with the government’s arrears, who can control it? The government’s debt to the enterprise, the enterprise owes the workers, this is the root cause.”, “There is no infringement of which rights, why not build a list of infringers? “, “Why do you want to collect wages? It is not on Time to pay wages! Forced people are forced to collect wages, who is right and who is wrong is very obvious! “, “or refuse to cure the source problem! If there is no unpaid wages, how can there be any wage claims?
Radio Free Asia reports that the governance approach is not the first of its kind in Jiaxing, and that in May 2020, the South Taihu Court in Huzhou City, Zhejiang Province, issued its first “abnormal list of workers’ rights”. The Huzhou court reported that the list was designed to deal with the phenomenon of workers “banging” companies, to regulate the abuse of rights, and to rationalize the allocation of arbitration and judicial resources.
An anonymous Shenzhen labor rights advocate said that the “abnormal list of labor rights” also existed in Guangdong Province before, but it was not made public.
This is not new,” the advocate said. When the Labor Contract Law was first introduced more than a decade ago, this problem existed in Guangdong. Some people said it was the list given by the labor bureau, others said it was the list given by the enterprises, but it wasn’t public, it was just circulated in the talent market and among human resource managers.”
The person said that the so-called “porcelain” rights are based on the fact that there are violations of the law, the relevant supervision and law enforcement departments should act in accordance with the law, rather than to distinguish whether the labor rights defenders are malicious rights: “No matter how many times the workers fight the lawsuit, it is the correction of illegal behavior, but also the protection of their rights. This is a sign that workers are aware of the law and of their rights. The government as a law enforcement agency should not see this as an anomaly, unless it is said that the defender of rights has abused the legal process to make some unreasonable demands. Workers protect their rights legally, and I don’t think there should be discrimination.”
Li Qiang, head of China Labor Watch, a U.S.-based human rights organization, agreed that labor disputes are a common phenomenon and that the government should not define labor rights as an anomaly or a “bumper sticker.
He said, “There is no such thing as a ‘workplace bumper sticker’. The concept of ‘bumper sticker’ is completely wrong. The government has mistaken the direction and the spearhead of this complaint.”
Li Qiang said that the “abnormal list of workers’ rights” is the government’s suppression of labor rights to protect local tax-paying enterprises: “At the core, this policy is to protect the interests of enterprises, because the government wants to keep enterprises in the local area, while complaints and rights of workers are mobile in other places. These enterprises can bring a lot of tax revenue to the local area, and the operation of the enterprises affects the interests of the local government, which in a way does not defend the rights of workers.”
Li Qiang believes that the governance approach will further lead to an imbalance in local labor-management relations, making it more difficult for workers with damaged interests to defend their rights in the future. He said the government should do a good job of labor protection, monitoring and arbitration independently, instead of abusing its power to suppress rights defenders.
Statistics from the Hong Kong-based China Labor Bulletin show that nearly 600 cases of workers defending their rights in China have been tracked online since late last year.
According to Geoffrey Crothall, a spokesman for China Labor Bulletin, at least 70 percent of these cases were collective protests to collect unpaid wages, each involving groups of about 100 migrant workers, and the total amount of wages owed was in the millions of yuan.
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