The evolution of individual and collective rights in the Chinese workplace

ABSTRACT Due to the underdeveloped nature of organized labor, it is possible to view the ‘individual’ and ‘collective’ components of labor legislation in China as separate and severable. This article aims to challenge such thinking by arguing that collective labor law and collective bargaining practices in China have profoundly shaped the law of employment contracts and individual employment relations. To this end, analyzing the laws surrounding individual employment contracts should not proceed without considering collective labor law. This article investigates, in the first three decades following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the significance of collective rights to the underdevelopment of legal rules of employment rights and the emergence of the socialist social contract. This article also examines, after the economic reform of 1978, the various ways collective bargaining contributed to the transformation from the socialist social contract to the standard contract of employment and from an underdeveloped to a comprehensive framework of employment legislation. Finally, in the post-economic-reform decades, the analysis suggests that collective bargaining encourages the empowerment of trade unions with legislative and administrative efforts and facilitates the incorporation of terms and conditions improvement into individual employment contracts.