The Social Protection of Rural Workers in the Construction Industry in Urban China

The construction industry is important for Chinese rural to urban migrants. Over 90%of urban construction workers are rural migrants, and over a third of all rural migrantswork in construction. The construction industry is not only particularly important, butis also different from other industries in its pay and labour recruitment practices. Incommon with other rural workers, construction workers have long suffered fromvarious problems, including delayed payment of salaries and exclusion from urbansocial security schemes. State policies designed to deal with these problems have ingeneral had mixed success. Partly as a result of the peculiarities of the constructionindustry, state policy has been particularly unsuccessful in dealing with the problemsfaced by construction workers.This paper considers both the risks rural workers in the construction industry facebecause of the work they do and the risks they face and because of their being ruralworkers. It shows that social protection needs to take into account both the workrelated risks and status related risks. The authors first review the literature concerningwork related risks, and then build up a framework to analyse the risks embedded intheir work and status, and the relationship between these risks and the existing formalsocial protection. Thirty one in depth interviews with construction workers, carriedout in Tianjin, PRC, are used to demonstrate both the risks and the inability of thestate-led social policy to tackle these risks. The results suggest that rural constructionworkers in cities were exposed to all sorts of problems from not being paid for theirwork in time to miserable living conditions, from having to pay for their ownhealthcare to no savings for old age. This paper highlights the problems of policyprescriptions that failed to recognise the complexity of the problems faced by theseworkers and criticises the tendency to seek quick fixes rather than long-term andcareful institutional design.[...]