Labor Market and Retirement Issues

The four articles in this issue of Chinese Sociology and Anthropology focus on regional comparison of migrant-worker status, labor contract, the logic of labor reproduction, and Guangzhou’s model of diversified endowment. Wan Xiangdong, Liu Linping, and Zhang Yonghong conduct a comparative analysis of the basic status of migrant workers in the Pearl and Yangtze river deltas based on survey data from over 1,000 questionnaires completed by migrant workers in these two regions that covered wages, benefits, the safeguarding of rights and interests, personal safety, and the external environment. They conclude that the status of migrant workers in the Pearl river Delta falls far below that of migrant workers in the Yangtze river Delta, and that apart from differences in human capital for workers in the two regions, institutional differences caused by factors such as enterprise structure may have an even more important role in causing these differences. Zhang Yonghong undertakes an empirical analysis of migrant-worker labor contracts from the standpoint of interactions between state interference and organizational fields, and finds that the move from asymmetric employment contracts to the three new types of employment contracts is occurring in the current migrant-labor market. He states that a standard