With decoupling of China and the US, the global production network has been reorganized and many factories were downsized or closed in China. To tackle with the challenge, the platform economy has been encouraged by the Chinese government to drive economic growth and offer job opportunities for the country’s huge labour force. 9.7 percent of the total workforce in 2019 worked in the platform economy, and this is much higher than key countries in the Global North, such as the UK (4%) and the US (0.4-0.6%) (Zhou, 2020). In 2021, total numbers of platform workers reached 84 millions (China State Information Center, 2021), which was higher than the whole manufacturing sector. The rise of platform employment has a created a problem for labour protection.

Since 2000s, the approach of ‘hard’ regulation has been adopted by the Chinese government under President Hu Jin Tao to formalize employment relations (Chan and Nadvi, 2014). For example, the Labour Contract Law made written contracts a legal obligation. After workers completed two consecutive contracts or were employed for ten continuous years, the employer was required to give them a permanent contract. The Social Insurance Law granted uniform protection to both urban and migrant workers in five areas: health, maternity, industrial injury, unemployment, and pensions. As platform workers are generally regarded as self-employed independent contractors, they are not entitled to the protections of these labour laws. Therefore, cases of detrimental working conditions, low pay, industrial accidents are widely reported, and labour protests are frequently taken place especially in the food delivery sector.

However, the response of the current government under President Xi Jinping is different from its predecessor. We suggest that a ‘soft’ regulation approach has been used to rebalance the employment relations in the platform economy. This includes a policy guideline of the national government in 2022 to regulate the labour practice of the platforms and offer semi-protection for workers, and many other guidelines in the local levels. This paper analyses this policy challenge, the effects of state soft regulations, and their implications on state, capital, and labour relations. Attentions will also be paid to the initiatives of the official All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) addressing the problem.

Conectez vous pour accéder au texte complet