The Past and Present Lives of Dispatched and Outsourced Workers (above)

Let's pause the task at hand and think about the connection between our daily lives and dispatched and outsourced workers. From the moment we open our eyes and remember that it is often because of them that we have cell phones that wake us up every morning, that we can take a cab to work, and that we can enjoy the pleasure of food without leaving our homes ...... They are also the cleaners who clean the city, the operator when we call 10086, the teller when we go to the bank to do business, the handyman when we go to the government departments, the gas station employees, the security guards at the entrance of the neighborhoods, and the uncles and aunts in the cafeteria to beat the food ......

A labor dispatch worker is a worker who has a labor relationship in the legal sense with a labor dispatch agency and is dispatched to other workplaces to perform labor. Outsourced workers are closely linked to dispatched workers. Legally, both types of workers have a labor relationship with the labor service company and have no labor relationship with the employer, but national level laws and government regulations currently do not define the difference between the two types of workers. In practice and in some local government regulations, those who are mainly under the management of the employer are considered dispatched workers, while those who are mainly under the management of the labor company are considered outsourced workers. In reality, it is very common to find "outsourced workers" who have the name of outsourcing but not the reality of management, a situation known as "real dispatch and false outsourcing". These two types of workers are the main types of workers in every organization, except for regular workers, and therefore deserve special attention. They repeat low-paying jobs for long periods of time, can be fired at any time, are trapped in the system, and are used to take the blame when things go wrong. ...... They are the backbone of our society and the scars of our society.

Sanitation women workers early in the morning to start the day busy, sweeping the road surface garbage, emptying, transferring garbage cans and other matters, guarding the city neat and clean. Indiscriminate contract labor system has a long history in China. The large-scale emergence of hired workers in China was after the middle of the Ming Dynasty, especially in the Yangtze River Delta region where the commodity economy was developed. At that time, according to the employment time limit, hired workers have appeared within the long labor and short labor. Long-term laborers were employed for at least one year, while short-term laborers were employed for less than one year, including daily, monthly, and quarterly laborers. In addition to direct employment, a prototype of the currently popular outsourcing system, the buyout system, has come into prominence. For example, in the Songjiang summer hosiery industry during the Ming Wanli period, the hosiery store merchants did not engage in production themselves, but contracted out production to surrounding farmers and then purchased their products, and one family thus became the hosiery store owner's small workshop.

The Opium War of 1840 opened the door to China and gave rise to modern industries and services that adopted new technologies and management styles. Since the second half of the 19th century, the in-sourcing system has become quite popular in China. This system was characterized by the fact that the factory owner did not directly employ and manage the workers, but rather did the work through contractors. Specifically, the factory owner provides the factory buildings, production equipment, and sometimes raw materials and working capital; the foreman is responsible for recruiting and managing the workers, and ensuring quality and quantity of production, a process that may involve layers of subcontracting; finally, the factory owner obtains the product and pays the foreman his personal salary and a fee for the work he has done; a portion of the fee is paid to the workers, and the rest is the foreman's commission. Under this system, the factory owner directly employs highly skilled personnel and managers (mainly the foreman), who are called ligongs, while the workers employed by the foreman are called xiaogongs. As far as the duration of employment is concerned, ligongs are basically long-time workers, while outsourced workers may be both long-time and short-time workers. The popularity of the internal contracting system continued into the Republican era. For example, in Shanghai at that time, almost all work in the dock industry, rickshaw industry, and construction industry was organized in this form; in railroad transportation and manufacturing, some processes adopted this form. The contract laborers profited greatly from this system. In the dock industry, rickshaw industry and shipbuilding industry in Shanghai during the Republic of China, the commission received by the foreman often accounted for more than half of the contract labor fee.

Undercurrent

During the planned economy period, the internal and external contracting system was continued, and the prototype of the labor dispatch system also appeared. During this period, China's urban employment population to the main fixed workers, including state-owned enterprises generally accounted for more than 60% of the fixed workers, collective enterprises also have a large number of fixed workers. At the same time, there was an undercurrent of temporary workers: even in state-owned enterprises, the proportion of temporary workers remained between 10-15% all year round, and even higher than 20% in individual years. Compared with permanent workers, temporary workers were discriminated against in many aspects. Unemployment was the biggest nightmare for workers at that time. In terms of employment stability, there was no labor contract between fixed workers and their employers, and except for extreme cases such as the failure of the Great Leap Forward, they enjoyed lifelong employment; whereas temporary workers did temporary, seasonal, or long-term work, and when they were not needed, when they were sick, injured, or pregnant, or when they behaved inappropriately, the fate that awaited them was dismissal. There have been cases of temporary workers committing suicide because of dismissal. In terms of workplace safety, temporary workers are concentrated in low-skill positions and are more likely to be assigned to dirty, tiring, and dangerous jobs than permanent workers, but often do not receive adequate workplace safety training and labor protection supplies, with the result that they have a higher rate of both workplace injuries and workplace deaths.

In terms of income, fixed-term workers mainly receive a monthly income, and stopping work for a day or two has little impact on their income; as their seniority and position increase, they can expect their wages to climb along the eight-tier wage system. In contrast, temporary workers take piecework or daily wages: once they stop working, they have no income, which limits their participation in collective action; and no matter how long their total **** adds up, their wages tend to stay at the lowest step of the eight-grade wage system. The income gap between permanent and temporary workers is so wide that some permanent workers hire temporary workers to work for them and then earn the wage difference for nothing. In terms of labor insurance and benefits, temporary workers are treated significantly worse than fixed workers in terms of sickness, injury, death, and maternity; fixed workers can get a monthly pension equal to 50-70% of their original salary after retirement, while temporary workers get nothing. Temporary workers are also often overlooked when it comes to minor benefits such as rice, flour, food and oil, soap and towels. In terms of political treatment, joining trade unions, party organizations and enterprise workers' congresses, which are the official political bodies, is almost the privilege of permanent workers, while temporary workers are excluded. In terms of human dignity, temporary workers are often looked down upon by regular workers and by many people in society, so much so that they are unable to take part in some public **** activities and buy some scarce goods. Temporary worker status is a big stone in their hearts, and some people are even ashamed to tell their dates about their temporary worker status for fear of being disliked by the other party.

On top of all this ****ness, there is also a great deal of variability within temporary workers, one dimension of which is their employment arrangements. During the planned economy, there were no labor contracts between permanent workers and their organizations. Initially, temporary workers also did not sign labor contracts.In 1957, in the context of urban population control, the nation began to introduce labor contracts among temporary workers, who thus became known as contract workers. These fixed-term labor contracts made it easier for employers to dismiss temporary workers. In the same year, the Beijing municipal government required urban employers to sign tripartite contracts with migrant workers and the agricultural production cooperatives to which they belonged. In addition to agreeing on the duration of employment, wages, and other basic labor conditions, the contracts also agreed on a share of the wages paid by the employer between the migrant workers and the cooperatives to which they belonged; in exchange, the cooperatives were responsible for the migrant worker's food rations during the period of his or her employment with the unit and for his or her livelihood after being dismissed from work due to illness or injury, and migrant workers were able to participate in the cooperatives' dividends. The State Council subsequently called for the implementation of this experience throughout the country. It is clear that under this arrangement, agricultural cooperatives played a role similar to that of current labor dispatch agencies. During the Great Leap Forward, such workers acquired a new name: also workers and farmers. In Shanghai, the agreed-upon split was that the migrant workers received only 40% of their wages, while the cooperatives took 60%, hence the name "four-six workers" in Shanghai. In the rest of the country, it is common for cooperatives to take 60 to 70 percent.

During the Great Leap Forward period, the state's labor policy shifted gradually from promoting fixed labor to both fixed and temporary labor, and even promoting temporary labor, which increased the expansion of temporary labor. However, the number of temporary workers in a single unit and the total amount of wages have long been controlled by the state. In order to bypass such controls, often with the acquiescence or even encouragement of local governments, units shifted to the use of outsourced workers whose numbers and payrolls were outside the scope of state control. This situation is the same as the state's tightening of regulations on dispatched workers after 2014, which resulted in employers turning to outsourced labor in droves. There are a number of organizing bodies for contracted labor. In cities, labor departments and street governments often organize unemployed people and housewives to provide services for other units; local government departments, such as the Transportation Bureau and the Handicrafts Bureau, also organize their own employees and family members to provide professional services; and in Shanghai, collective enterprises are also qualified to do outsourced work as long as they are willing to take on foreign business. In the countryside, it is the people's commune and the production team that organizes the contracting team. Typically, the organizers of the teams take 10-25% of the wages of the contracted workers as a commission.

Depending on whether or not they worked with regular workers, they were categorized as "outsourced laborers" and "outsourced laborers". According to the archives, in 1967, the Shanghai Municipal District in the name of labor service team organizations engaged in outsourcing work of about 75,000 people, of which 59,000 outsourcing to do, outsourcing to do 16,000 people; Luwan, Jing'an, Changning, Hongkou, Zhabei and other five districts of outsourcing can be divided into two kinds of permanent and temporary production needs, the former accounted for the outsourcing to do the number of total number of workers, 79%, outsourcing to do the number of workers. The former accounted for 79% of the total number of outsourced workers, while the latter accounted for 67% of the total number of outsourced workers. The Shanghai Labor Bureau had requested in 1964 that outsourced inward workers should be managed by the contractors rather than the employers. This regulation implies the universality of the management of outsourced workers by the employers at that time, which is similar to the current popularity of "fake outsourcing and real dispatching". The outsourced workers managed by the foreman were obviously a continuation of the outsourcing system that was popular in the late Qing Dynasty, while the outsourced workers managed by the foreman were typical workers under the outsourcing system.

The differences within the temporary workers led to a differentiation of their treatment. According to household registration, urban temporary workers are better off than their rural counterparts. Rural temporary workers often do not enjoy any labor insurance benefits and have no hope of being regularized, while urban temporary workers (except for outsourced workers) can do both. Within temporary workers of urban household registration, regular temporary workers (directly employed by the employer) are at the top of the temporary worker pyramid according to the employment arrangement. Their labor insurance benefits are in accordance with the prevailing labor insurance regulations, and they often have the opportunity to be regularized; there are mostly male workers in this category. Other temporary workers and outsourcing of the boundaries of the workers are often not very clear, the gap between the labor insurance benefits and treatment is also large, in which the factory is arranged by the street into the workers and the factory's own family members of the employees to come in to do the work of the workers tend to enjoy a certain amount of free medical treatment, and with the other outsourcing of the workers do not have any health care treatment, and there is no opportunity to change the corrective action. The wages of outsourced workers are lower than those of regular temporary workers, and when they get sick, they often cannot afford a doctor, and illness makes them more likely to be fired. Therefore, when they fall ill, outsourced workers often fall into a desperate situation of poverty and illness. The situation of female outsourced workers is particularly miserable, so much so that there are accounts of female outsourced workers who, after becoming pregnant and fearing dismissal, tightened their stomachs and eventually gave birth to dead babies. In daily life, the whole group of temporary workers is looked down upon by the permanent workers, and the outsourced workers are looked down upon by the other temporary workers. The difference between the outsourced workers and the other temporary workers leads to the fact that switching from outsourced to regular temporary workers is considered as a reward or relief. This generally occurred when the outsourced worker was needed on a regular basis, or when the outsourced worker had a work-related injury or occupational disease. These circumstances led to outsourced workers being a significant force in the temporary labor movement of 1966-1967.

A takeaway boy braves the cold to run through the streets. Frenzy of reform and opening up, the original system of urban employment of fixed workers as the main body was abolished, the labor contract system as the main body of the employment system in the country to implement. In tandem with this change, dispatched and outsourced workers have become a frenzy from the undercurrent of the planning era. At the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, with the general increase in population and the return of a large number of young intellectuals to the cities, the pressure on urban employment was enormous. In response, the central government encouraged local governments to establish labor service companies. These companies were actually a more formalized form of the previous labor service teams. At one time, local labor bureaus, personnel bureaus, trade unions, streets, and state-owned enterprises responded.In 1987, there were 56,000 labor service companies, employing 7.3 million workers and managing 1.7 million temporary workers. The labor service companies served the unemployed, the semi-unemployed, and the redundant workers in the reform of state-owned enterprises. The companies provide them with training, introduce them to jobs, or form them into service teams to undertake work, or dispatch them to labor units to labor.

The new era of dispatched and outsourced workers was initially an accompaniment to SOE reform. Once a worker was identified as redundant, the worker remained unchanged from the SOE in terms of labor relations on the one hand, and on the other hand was placed under the management of a labor service company affiliated with the SOE, with a significant portion of them being dispatched or outsourced to outside units. Through dispatching and outsourcing, the original organization not only reduces the number of redundant workers, but also receives commissions from outside organizations. In the 1990s, as the reform of state-owned enterprises entered the deep water, more and more workers were laid off, and the government required state-owned enterprises to set up re-employment centers, which, apart from granting subsistence allowances to laid-off workers and paying them labor insurance, functioned in much the same way as the labor service companies of the 1980s. These centers were closed down one after another at the beginning of the new century. At the same time, in order to help laid-off workers re-employ themselves, governments at all levels, from the central to the local level, have vigorously encouraged the development of labor dispatch companies, and to that end have introduced measures such as financial subsidies and tax reductions and exemptions. For example, the Interim Measures for the Administration of Labor Dispatch Organizations in Beijing, which was introduced in 1999, stipulates that if a new labor dispatch organization recruits more than 30 laid-off workers and signs a labor contract with them for more than two years and completes the probationary period, it can enjoy a one-time subsidy of 50,000-200,000 yuan from the municipal labor and social security department and the financial department at the same level. ...... If a labor dispatch organization recruits laid-off workers, reaches more than 50% of the total number of employees, and maintains the labor relationship for more than 3 years (inclusive), it can enjoy the preferential policy of subsidizing the equivalent amount of business tax for 3 years from the date when the number of people to be placed reaches the prescribed ratio.In 2003, the then President Hu Jintao pointed out in one of his speeches that: "We have to actively develop the labor dispatch and other types of Employment service organizations, guiding scattered individual laid-off and unemployed people to organize themselves, and providing organizational support and assistance for them to realize re-employment."

The control of payroll for SOEs is also the reason for their extensive use of dispatched and outsourced workers. In order to enhance the efficiency of SOEs, the total wage bill of SOEs has been linked to their economic performance since 1985. According to the accounting standards for SOEs formulated by the SASAC, only the wages of regular workers are included in the total wage bill, while the wages of temporary workers are included in operating expenses, which are outside the control of the SASAC. Moreover, the income of regular workers in SOEs is always higher than the average level of the society, while the salary of temporary workers is much lower. This means that employing a large number of temporary workers can not only help SOEs reduce labor costs and improve economic efficiency, but also help SOEs expand their payrolls and consolidate their vested interests.

In the early 1980s, the urban labor market was liberalized for rural areas. The wave of urban-rural migration drove the development of labor dispatch. Although the vast majority of rural migrant workers migrated to cities to work either spontaneously or with the help of their own friends and relatives, some of them were assisted by local labor dispatch agencies in the process of migration. These agencies are organized by county and township governments and their affiliates. Local governments also assisted in organizing migrants into construction contracting teams or nanny teams to contract out services. This type of practice still exists today, especially in some remote and backward areas. In the poverty eradication station that ended the year before last, it was an important practice for the government to export laborers to help the people out of poverty.

The entry of foreign capital into China has also fueled the development of labor dispatch. For the foreign representative offices in China and foreign companies that entered China in the early days, they knew little about the country and found it inconvenient to recruit labor. At the same time, the government intended to regulate these foreign organizations by controlling employment. One of the first professional dispatch organizations in China - Beijing Foreign Enterprise Human Resource Service Company (FESCO), established in 1979 - was created against this background. This type of foreign manpower service company is to this day a dominant player in China's labor dispatch market. Afterwards, although foreign-funded organizations had the right to recruit workers, the practice of using dispatched workers was maintained for a long time. Another reason for foreign companies to use dispatched workers is that some multinational companies have control over the number of staff in their China offices, and using dispatched workers can bypass this control and increase the number of employees.

The development of labor-intensive enterprises has also contributed to the surge in dispatching. For example, in Dongguan in the 1980s, the local government not only set up its own labor intermediaries to provide manpower to companies, but also encouraged the development of private intermediaries to meet the needs of the booming export processing industry. Wenzhou at the same time also witnessed the rise of private intermediaries to provide manpower for the booming private enterprises. These intermediaries first profited by collecting money from job seekers. With the advent of the labor shortage era, they shifted to charging labor-using enterprises to make profits, and their main form was labor dispatch. In the era of labor shortage, before the factory in front of the door to post a recruitment notice can attract job seekers such as crucian carp era is gone. With the shortage of labor coupled with the short-term employment of the new generation of migrant workers, it has become too expensive for factories to recruit on their own, so they have to resort to labor intermediaries. In addition, after the global financial crisis in 2008, the global economy weakened and China's exports were affected. For factory operators, there used to be not only enough workers, but also enough orders; now, it is not only difficult to recruit workers, but also difficult to find orders. This situation means that orders have become more volatile. In order to control costs, companies must synchronize the volatility of the workforce. This situation is now the norm for export-oriented factories in China.

There are two main roles of labor intermediaries, one is to help factories recruit a sufficient number of workers and legally dismiss unwanted workers, especially when orders fluctuate dramatically and companies must expand or reduce manpower in a short period of time; the need for legal dismissal has become particularly urgent after the implementation of the Labor Contract Law; the other is to help factories to reduce the turnover rate of workers. Labor intermediaries can achieve the first role mainly because their cooperative relationship often forms a chain or even a network of intermediaries with layers of subcontracting, which enables them to extend their tentacles to many places and reach many workers. Since labor intermediaries hold the supply of labor, they are not willing to earn only a one-time recruitment fee, but tend to charge a headcount fee, say $100 per person per month, according to the working hours of the labor provided. This is when labor intermediaries become labor dispatch companies. In reality, the line between the two is not clear, so this paper uses a mixture of the two terms. The second role of labor intermediaries is an extension of the first. For factories, high turnover of recruited workers is a big problem. This is why factories are willing to accept monthly payments to labor intermediaries. This monthly payment turns the reduction of worker turnover into a problem for the labor intermediary. Labor intermediaries often stabilize workers by sending in resident managers to provide services to workers and mediate conflicts between workers and the factory.

Construction workers performing construction work.On January 1, 2008, the Labor Contract Law came into effect. The law greatly strengthens the legal protection of regular workers. The most important provisions of the law include: (1) labor contract provisions: the employer from the date of employment for more than one month less than one year has not entered into a written labor contract with the worker, shall pay two times the monthly wages to the worker; more than one year without a contract, the employer is deemed to have entered into an open-ended labor contract with the worker. (2) Unfixed-term contract terms: If the employer has employed a worker continuously for more than 10 years, or has entered into a contract with the worker for the third consecutive time, the employer shall enter into an unfixed-term labor contract. (3) Unlawful dismissal compensation clause: If the employer terminates the contract before the expiration of the contract through no fault of the laborer, the employer shall pay the laborer double the economic compensation. These clauses increase the risk that the employer will not sign an employment contract with the employee. And once an employment contract is signed, the employer loses the freedom to dismiss the employee, as compensation must be considered. In addition, the Social Insurance Law, which came into effect on July 1, 2011, and the Housing Provident Fund Regulations, which were amended in 2002, set out the obligations of employers with respect to "five insurance policies and one pension". Together, the five insurance and one pension often account for more than 40% of an individual's pre-tax salary, making it a huge expense that employers want to avoid. In order to avoid these obligations, enterprises use a large number of dispatched workers, which eventually leads to the great expansion of dispatched workers. Dispatched workers sign labor contracts with labor dispatch agencies and then send them to work in enterprises. In this way, the labor dispatching agency becomes the employing unit, the first bearer of the above obligations, and the enterprise is only the employing unit. Through the use of dispatched workers, the employer is not only able to realize that the employees are at their beck and call, but also able to realize that they are at their beck and call by withdrawing from the workforce at any time. Indefinite term clauses and unlawful dismissal indemnity clauses do not pose a problem for dispatching organizations. When employees are returned to the dispatching organization, it is very simple for the dispatching organization to get rid of them: it can force them to leave automatically by dispatching them to jobs they don't want to go to, thus achieving the result of 0-cost dismissal. As for the five insurance and one gold, China's current law enforcement is not very strong, there are still formal workers do not pay, omitted to pay, not according to the actual wage base to pay and so on, the dispatched workers, not to mention. The practice of many enterprises is to pay five insurance and one gold to a small number of employees for inspection.

Under the ****same effect of these factors, dispatched workers have expanded in large numbers. There is no agreement on the number of dispatched workers in China. One of the more authoritative is the estimate of the National Federation of Trade Unions:In 2011, there were about 42 million dispatched workers in China, of which 37 million in enterprises (accounting for 13.1% of the total number of employees in enterprises), and 5 million in state organs and institutions; of which 16.2% of the employees in state-owned enterprises are dispatched workers, and dispatched workers accounted for more than 60% of the workers in some centralized enterprises, such as telecommunication, postal service and petrochemicals; more than 60% of dispatched workers in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and foreign-invested enterprises, 14% of the staff for the dispatched workers; in 2011, the Shanghai Municipality surveyed more than 1,805 enterprises of more than 400,000 employees, labor dispatch workers accounted for 25%, an increase of 36.1% over 2007.

In the face of the abuse of dispatched workers, the state has tried to limit through legislation, the employer's response to this is to use a large number of "outsourced workers". In fact, there is a section on labor dispatch in the Labor Contract Law, which stipulates the obligations of both dispatchers and employers, but it is clear that these provisions have not prevented the proliferation of dispatched workers. This amendment raises the entry requirements for the labor dispatch business, further clarifies the standard of equal pay for dispatched workers and regular workers of the employing organization, and also strengthens the restrictions on the scope of use of dispatched workers.

The strictest regulation comes from the Interim Provisions on Labor Dispatch, which came into effect on March 1, 2014, and which restricts only the enterprises, not the employers, from using dispatched workers. This regulation only restricts enterprises, not state agencies and institutions. It requires enterprises to reduce the proportion of dispatched workers in the total number of employees by March 1, 2016 to less than 10%. The original intent of this regulation was to force enterprises to convert dispatched workers. However, instead of doing so, enterprises have converted a large number of dispatched workers into "outsourced workers" to achieve the purpose of reducing the ratio. In order to become this transformation, enterprises only need to sign an outsourcing contract with the labor dispatch agency, the labor dispatch agency to the contracting fee (including the dispatch agency's service fee and the dispatched worker's salary) as the basis for tax; and this before the labor dispatch agency is the service fee as the basis for tax. In this process, the intermediary organization providing third-party services often remains unchanged, and the workers are still managed by the employing organization, with only the paperwork and tax payment changing. Therefore, this practice is called "real dispatch, false outsourcing". It is the main means for enterprises to reduce the proportion of dispatched workers. In fact, the threshold of outsourcing business is much higher than that of dispatching, so on the one hand, employers cannot find reliable outsourcing organizations in the market, and on the other hand, they are not willing to support an outsourcing company to compete with them. The result is inevitably the proliferation of "real dispatch and fake outsourcing". It is not that the government has not anticipated this kind of response from enterprises. In fact, the consultation draft of the Interim Provisions on Labor Dispatch pointed out that if an employer contracts out its business to a contracting unit, but directly manages the labor process of the workers of the contracting unit who are engaged in the business, it is considered as labor dispatching. But this provision was deleted in the "Interim Provisions on Labor Dispatch" formally promulgated, so that enterprises can be emboldened to abuse the "true dispatch, false outsourcing" to achieve the purpose of reducing the ratio.

After the Interim Provisions on Labor Dispatch, the proliferation of dispatched and outsourced workers has continued, but no new regulatory measures have been introduced, and the implementation of the old measures has been weak. In fact, with the adjustment of the economic growth rate, the issue of how labor policies can serve enterprises to reduce costs and increase efficiency has been pushed to the front of the curtain. In order to help enterprises reduce costs, some places, such as Guangdong Province, have lowered the proportion of social insurance contributions by enterprises. This practice is directionally consistent with enterprises evading their social security obligations through labor dispatch, and the laxity of the enforcement of labor dispatch regulations can thus be imagined, and is actually in a state where the people do not report and the officials are not investigated. According to the author's team in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Tianjin, Changsha and other places in 2016 on the labor-intensive enterprises survey, more than half of the employees are dispatched workers is the general situation of such enterprises.