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Chapter 3 Legislating Harmony Labor Law Reform in Contemporary China Mary E. Gallagher and Baohua Dong In March 2006, the NPC opened a thirty-day period of public comment on the then-draft Labor Contract Law (passed in June 29, 2007).The increasingly frequent process of public comment on draft laws is touted as part of the NPC “mass line” in legislation, part of its new commitment to public participation and social voice in the legislative drafting process (“Mass Line for Legislation” 2006). In recent years, at least a dozen laws have had a period of public comment during drafting. In the thirty-day period of public comment, the NPC received over 191,000 comments regarding the draft Labor Contract Law.This number far exceeded the comments received about other important and controversial laws. For example, the Property Law, passed in March 2007, received only a little over 11,000 comments. The degree of public attention to the Labor Contract Law is unprecedented in the reform era.The drafting and implementation processes of this new important law are windows into the Chinese rule of law development and its transformation through greater social participation and transparency.They are indications of the increasing contentious state of labor relations in China today as that state attempts to improve working conditions and employment security in the wake of increased public attention to labor abuses, sweatshop conditions, and growing informalization of employment. By following the process of legislative drafting and subsequent implementation of this new law, we can gain insights into the structural dimensions of Chinese politics that affect labor legislation, including which social actors are formal participants in the legislative process and which are excluded.We also Legislating Harmony 37 gain greater understanding of the dynamic forces of change that are putting pressure on the institutions of a political system that has remained far more static than the Chinese economy, especially with its rapid integration with global production networks through foreign direct investment and the creation of a domestic private sector. Perhaps because Law (writ large) is one of the critical institutions that connects politics to the economy, it is exactly in this lawmaking process that we see the internal contradictions of the Chinese political system most clearly. This chapter examines the evolution of Chinese labor and employment legislation, from the initial drafting of the first National Labor Law in 1994 to the drafting and implementation of the Labor Contract Law.We first compare the social contexts of the 1994 National Labor Law and the 2007 draft of the Labor Contract Law. The National Labor Law (passed July 1,1994) was part of a top-down strategy to rework Chinese labor relations from the “iron rice bowl” of the Maoist era to more flexible and efficient “contract labor relations.” It was also a response to the rapidly growing, but largely unregulated, foreign and private sectors on China’s coastal provinces. By 2007, the Hu-Wen administration had new concerns, some of which were directly related to the successes of the earlier attacks on lifetime employment and job security.Abusive working conditions, lack of employment security, widespread use of temporary and informal workers, and annual increases in labor conflict were all indicative of the radically changed social context of Chinese labor legislation.Whereas the 1994 legislation was a premeditated move to“smash”the“iron rice bowl,”2007 was touted as the “year of social legislation,” the belated government attempt to catch up with and mitigate some of the adverse effects of the rapid transformation of China (Zhu 2007).The Labor Contract Law was the key law amid several new labor laws that were passed or were drafted during this period. Next, we examine the drafting process itself, with particular attention to the effects of increased transparency and public participation.The draft labor contract law became one of the touchstones for a growing debate between the continued pursuit of economic reform, flexibility, and globalization and a switch to increased social protection,stability,and decreased reliance on foreign investment.The public comment period further emphasized divergent interests, in particular a clash between the interests of foreign companies and the rights of Chinese workers.This chapter questions whether this clash is really the most salient issue surrounding this law; nevertheless, the fact that public discourse focused on it made it the central issue for the media and many other public commentators.We examine why certain voices become more engaged in this period of public comment while other actors...

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