Socialist Progressives

How have labour relations changed since the onset of economic reform?

There has been a fundamental shift from a tightly controlled and planned economy based on state-ownership of enterprises in the late 1970s towards what is basically a market economy today. Under the planned economy, workers made up a relatively small proportion of China’s largely rural population and had a so-called job for life with a wide-range of welfare benefits. During the 1990s some 30 million state-owned enterprise employees were laid off, while the urban job market opened up to hundreds of millions of rural migrant workers. The Chinese government gradually abdicated its power in labour relations to business owners, and workers were employed on terms and conditions largely dictated by the employer.