Panel Paper:
Toward the Rule of Law? Governing Welfare State in Post-Socialist Country
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
:
11:30 AM
Clement House, 3rd Floor, Room 06 (London School of Economics)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
From 1990s onwards, the labour and social protection institutions in China had experienced significant changes which introduced market ideas such as labour deregulation and welfare reform. The ‘great transformation’ was often seen, by mainstream, as a brutal retrenchment of socialist style welfare state in which state-owned enterprise (SOE) assumed the function of distributing all-encompassing welfare package at the expense of economic efficiency. This article argues that, despite the neoliberal style ‘surgery’ aimed at SOE restructuring during the mid-1990s, in respect of social security system, the invention of legal institution in the form of urban labour and social legislations has however taken charge of welfare responsibility from workplace to municipal level. In this process, preexisting welfare programs were not straightforwardly dismantled but preconditioned the following founded social insurance scheme which was relatively limited in scope and based on hierarchical labour relation that consistent with regulated social status underpinned by historical institutional constraints. This deep-seated notion of ‘welfare prerogative’ amounts to the ‘crowding out’ effect on the migrants workers who gradually become the majority within urban labour force. With the recent advents of ‘labour contract law’ in 2008 and ‘social insurance law’ in 2010, the social security system has largely expanded its scope towards migrant workers who were previously considered as ‘outsiders’ in the institutional array due to the ‘informalization’ or ‘casualization’. The article will analyses, by the case study on labour dispute resolutions within local labour mechanisms, the effects of these ambitious national legal projects which both intend to universalize labour contract and harmonize welfare standard, and show how litigants and legislators intervene to meet tripartite interests in situated contexts.
Keywords welfare state reform, legal institution, Informalization, China
