Variety and Changes among Workers in China:An Empirical Test of Young Workers’ Labor Law Knowledge

In recent years, workers’ legal knowledge is considered to be a crucial component in China because the government strongly encourages aggrieved workers to use the law as their source of leverage in its complaint-based rights protection system. Despite growing interest in the salient ‘bottom-up enforcement’ and the strong rights consciousness of the young workers who comprise over 60 percent of all workers in China, little is known about this topic. Against this background, this paper intends to offer a detailed analysis of the varied levels of legal knowledge among these young workers, drawing on data from extensive qualitative field research as well as 326 surveys collected from job-seekers in eastern coastal China in 2011. The findings present that the second-generation workers in China is not a homogenous group, and demonstrate differing levels of legal knowledge depending upon individual and contextual factors. Specifically, the findings show that the socio-demographic backgrounds of these workers, including hometown, work experience, access to the internet, and dispute experience are associated with a higher level of legal knowledge across three major provisions of current Chinese labor law: written labor contracts, social insurance, and overtime premiums.