SUN
WUKONG China's great wall of job
discrimination By Wu Zhong, China
Editor
HONG KONG - Although the Chinese
Communist Party still upholds the late leader Deng
Xiaoping's policy of "building a socialist market
economy", today's China in fact has the ugly
features of unbridled capitalism at its early
stage. One such feature is social injustice. And
one of the rampant malpractices of social
injustice is discrimination in employment.
While China now suffers a shortage of
talents and skilled workers
in
certain fields such as high technology, finance or
management, the labor market in the country in
general is still dictated by oversupply of labor
given its huge working population. This enables
employers to become very picky in hiring workers
by setting up various discriminatory requirements.
And job discrimination is found not only in the
private sector but among government departments
and government-related institutions as well.
In August 2005, the Standing Committee of
the National People's Congress, China's
parliament, ratified the International Labor
Organization's Discrimination (Employment and
Occupation) Convention, 1958. But surveys last
year and recent media reports show discrimination
in employment still runs rampant in the country.
Between May and October 2006, Cai
Dingjian, a professor with China University of
Political Science and Law, led a team to conduct a
survey on job discrimination in 10 major Chinese
cities - Beijing, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Wuhan,
Shenyang, Xian, Chengdu, Zhengzhou, Yingchuan and
Qingdao. The results show that discrimination in
employment is a serious problem in China. Some
85.5% of the respondents said there is job
discrimination, and more than half of all the
interviewees said the discrimination is "very
serious" or "considerably serious".
The
poll finds that the most victimized are the
disabled. About 22% of the disabled interviewees
said their job applications had been turned down.
Next are people with low education (18.7%) and
then job-seekers who do not have local
hukou or residency registration.
And employers do not hide their
discrimination against the disabled, as 51.3% of
the interviewed employers said that when they turn
down job seekers for health reasons, they frankly
say so to them.
More striking, 65.9% of
the respondents say there is discrimination in the
recruitment of civil servants. Excuses for the
discrimination are low education (45%), absence of
a local hukou (43%), disability (40.9%) and
other health problems (40.7%).
"It may be
reasonable for government departments to set
education requirements for their employees. But it
is by all means discrimination to require an
applicant to have a local hukou. Does where
one is from have anything to do with his or her
capability to work in a government department?"
Cai told the media when releasing the survey.
Moreover, he said it has been found that
in some cases of civil-service recruitment there
were discriminatory requirements regarding the
applicants' sex, height and appearance. "Many
courts demand [that] applicants have dignified
features, saying this is to show the dignity of
the law. This is nonsense," he said. An ongoing
court case serves a good illustration in this
regard.
Last June, the personnel and labor
authority of Tiantai county, Zhejiang province,
put up a notice to recruit three clerks for the
local court. Hu Binbin, a 24-year-old local woman
who had been working in the court as a part-time
clerk for three years, filed an application. She
failed to pass the physical examination because
she was a bit shorter than the 158 centimeters
required by the court. Hu then filed a lawsuit
with the county court against the personnel
authority for job discrimination, as no law and
regulation sets a requirement on height for a
court clerk.
Hu lost her case in the first
trial. She then appealed to the Intermediate Court
of Taizhou city, whose jurisdiction covers Tiantai
county. The court hearing was held this April and
the court has yet to pass down its ruling.
If there is such serious job
discrimination in government recruitment, it is
not hard to imagine how rampant the malpractice is
in the private sector. And not only ordinary
laborers but university graduates now also suffer
discrimination in employment.
The rapid
expansion of higher education over the past decade
has resulted in an oversupply of university
graduates, particularly those in humanities, arts
and social sciences. Official statistics show that
nearly half of the graduates could not find jobs
after graduation last year. As a result,
university graduates, who used to be regarded as
"sons and daughters of heaven" and who never
worried about employment, now also suffer
discrimination when they compete with one another
for jobs. According to a survey co-sponsored by
China Central Television, 74% of job-seeking
university graduates say they are discriminated
against.
For university graduates, sexism
is the most common form of job discrimination.
Employers normally prefer men to women when they
have a choice. Another survey co-sponsored by
Sina.com showed that 60% of female graduates
interviewed said they had more difficulty finding
employment than their male competitors.
A
boss of a trading company in Shenzhen does not
hide his sexist view, saying it is out of
"practical concerns". "I prefer hiring male
staffers. A female university graduate would soon
get married after taking a job. Then she would get
pregnant and give birth to a child, taking a long
leave. Afterward her mind would be occupied with
her baby and could hardly concentrate on her work
even during office hours. It's troublesome. In
contrast, a male employee normally would be more
career-oriented," he said, declining to be named.
There are now even cases that job seekers
from the one-child generation are discriminated
against. A civil servant from Tianjin municipality
complains that his only son's job application has
been rejected by several large state-owned
enterprises, which all say, "We don't consider
single-child applicants." The reason? Single
children born after 1980 are generally spoiled,
are unable to endure hardships, and cannot get
along with others.
"Such discrimination is
openly defiant against the one-child policy, which
is a national policy backed up by law. The
government must do something to stop such illegal
practice," the civil servant said.
But
since most youngsters in their 20s today are
single children, how do these enterprises find
employees? "They would look for university
graduates from farmers' families, as the one-child
policy is not carried out to the letter in the
countryside. And even a single child from a
farmer's family may be considered less spoiled,"
he said.
Job discrimination runs rampant
because there is no legal protection for equal
opportunity in employment. China's constitution
stipulates, "Citizens enjoy equal right of
employment." The Labor Law says, "Laborers enjoy
equal right of employment and selection of jobs"
and "Laborers shall not be discriminated against
because of their ethnicity or religious beliefs."
Except for such vague stipulations of principle,
there is no detailed legislation on what should be
banned as job discrimination.
China's fast
economic development over nearly three decades has
greatly benefited from globalization. To cope, the
country has been trying to adapt to international
practices by ratifying international covenants and
conventions such as the Discrimination (Employment
and Occupation) Convention, 1958. But after
signing and ratifying such documents, China has
rarely passed the necessary legislation for their
implementation.
The International Labor
Organization convention has a clear-cut definition
of what constitutes job discrimination. If the
Chinese government is serious about implementing
the convention, it should work out detailed laws
and regulations. Only in this way can the
constitutional right of Chinese citizens to equal
job opportunities be truly and fully protected.
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