Tripartite consultation: an emergent form of governance shaping employment relations in China

This article examines China's approach to industrial consultation by examining six tripartite bodies at the national, provincial and county levels. It argues that the institutionalisation of tripartitism is consistent with China's overall approach to market reform being characterised by experimentalism, gradualism, dynamism and a gradual softening of party domination. Despite limitations, it is accepted that China is building a transition tripartite system that is bolstering the autonomy and representational capacity of the social partners

Perceptions of the effectiveness of training and development of 'grey-collar' workers in the People's Republic of China

An important human resource development (HRD) implication of the People's Republic of China's (PRC) rapidly expanding economy has been the emergence of a critical shortage of grey-collar workers (GCW). Although ‘grey-collar’ has been commonly used in the West to describe an aging population within the workforce, in China it refers to people who are neither white nor blue collar workers but technicians. The shortage of GCW constrains the PRC's economic and developmental sustainability, and has been recognized in central and provincial government initiatives to increase training and development of employees within these fields. While acknowledged as a policy and organizational problem, there has been no research investigating what organizations are doing to develop these employees. Drawing upon a survey of 310 semi-skilled and skilled employees in Beijing, our findings suggest that while the surveyed organizations are investing heavily in both on- and off-the-job training, employees' perceived value of such differs markedly according to age and position. The research has important implications for China's HRD strategy in suggesting links between training and other human resource management (HRM) functions are yet to be evidenced

Migrants as Homo economicus : explaining the emerging phenomenon of a shortage of migrant labor in China\u27s coastal provinces

The problem of a shortage of migrant labor is a new development in China\u27s coastal provinces. We discuss the reasons for this emerging phenomenon using a conceptual framework that extends the traditional Lewis dualistic labor market model to incorporate a migrant labor market. We emphasize that migrant labor shortage in China not only reflects a declining wage gap between what peasants receive and what migrants can earn in the cities, but also the institutional legacies of the planning era such as the hukou (household registration) system which discriminates against migrants vis-a-vis urban residents in terms of access to social insurance and other social services. We proceed to draw on a unique survey of migrants and urban residents collected in Jiangsu to show that migrants receive lower incomes, and they have poorer access to social insurance than those with an urban registration in China\u27s cities. Our findings have important implications for the alleviation of the migrant labor shortage problem