Framing Disputes: Labour Law and Legal Aid NGOs in China

In the year 2008 a significant legal reform was introduced into China’s labor regime with the enactment of new laws, the Labor Contract Law and the Labor Disputes Mediation and Arbitration Law amongst them. Since then, labor disputes brought to the legal channels –which had steadily grown throughout the 1990s and early 2000s- experienced an exponential rise: a 98% increase between 2007 and 2008.

Official statistics on labor legal disputes evidence a greater readiness to use the established legal channels to resolve conflict. Key in inducing this readiness has been the role of legal aid NGOs that provide legal services to peasant-workers (nonmingong, the bulk of Chinese labor force in industrial areas). These civil society actors - legal aid centers, labor NGOs and lawyers - provide free legal services, legal consultation, and legal training. On behalf of peasant-workers, they advocate for the protection of their legitimate rights, claiming for better enforcement and compliance of the laws, hence contributing to the development of the legal system. Moreover, they elicit the rise of workers’ rights consciousness and kindle their dispute behavior into legal action.

Through an analysis of the aforementioned labor laws and through qualitative material collected during ethnographic research in China during 2012-2013, this paper argues that the labor laws and the support structure of legal aid centers, NGOs and lawyers intends to relieve the increasing levels of industrial conflict in China by framing the nature of labor conflict and dispute behavior: the definition of what constitutes a legitimate dispute in labor relations and its procedures for resolution (including a specific idea of legal justice) is pre-determined by law. This way labor conflict is contained, and by avoiding its spread and radicalization, the government of the Chinese Communist Party maintains the necessary and desired social order for its economic development model.