What Is a Construction Laborer?

Construction workers refer to workers engaged in construction work. Construction workers in the 1980s refer to regular and casual workers working in construction companies. With the reform of the enterprise, some construction workers were transferred to other industries, and some of them became construction contractors. Today's construction workers are basically farmers from the countryside, and very few are college students. The number of college students is increasing.

construction worker

(Occupation)

discuss

Construction workers refer to workers engaged in construction work. Construction workers in the 1980s refer to regular and casual workers working in construction companies. With the reform of the enterprise, some construction workers were transferred to other industries, and some of them became construction contractors. Today's construction workers are basically farmers from the countryside, and very few are college students. The number of college students is increasing.

Chinese name

construction worker

Foreign name

BUILDER

organizer

Beijing Construction Engineering Group Co., Ltd.

organizer

Beijing Construction Engineering Group Co., Ltd.

Editor in chief

Peng Xuefei

Due to the basic characteristics of the production cycle, the regional nature of the product, and the impact of the climate on the production process in the construction contractor in New China, the construction industry cannot be mechanized like manufacturing, and a large amount of live labor (that is, laborers) is retained. Under the demand for effective management of live labor, the contract labor system has emerged. This system is based on traditional social relations. On the one hand, it can rely on the existing rural network to speed up the organization of the labor force. On the other hand, it can use the trust of acquaintances to effectively restrain the various demands and grievances of workers. In a nutshell, the core point of this view is that the contract labor system is a companion to construction production. But the contract labor system is neither a twin brother of the Chinese construction industry nor a phenomenon unique to the construction industry. In fact, in the 60-year history of New China, the contract labor system has been in three ups and downs, and the living conditions of workers under it have been completely different from today. The first prosperity of the labor contract system can be traced back to the early days of the founding of the PRC. From 1949 to 1957, post-war restoration and reconstruction projects required a large amount of labor, while few professional construction companies. Relying on existing organizational resources, various contracted employment systems have emerged on demand. There are mainly four types: First, the Ministry of Railways and other professional departments have organized internal staff to set up construction enterprises and carry out construction in a self-employed or in-sourced manner; State-owned enterprises use their own labor to carry out construction; third, they used engineering soldiers as the main force and a small number of private enterprises. After the reorganization and reconstruction, a professional construction company was established, which was unified under the management of the newly established Ministry of Construction and was responsible for contracting the rest The construction projects of some ministries and enterprises are usually called "outsourcing". Fourth, construction unions in various places organize unemployed people in the society to form collective-owned urban construction cooperatives. During this period, the team of construction workers grew rapidly. As of the end of 1952, the number of employees in the above-mentioned state-owned construction enterprises reached 995,000, and by the height of socialist transformation in 1956, the number of workers organized by cooperatives had reached 1.26 million. In the early days of the founding of the People s Republic of China, the supplies were scarce, but these workers could either receive the state's ration subsidy on a monthly basis or receive a piece rate on time. From 1958 to 1962, when the basic construction of various state-owned construction companies was mature, the above-mentioned various types of contracting systems were gradually abandoned as a practice of capitalism. At this time, construction projects are included in the name of the annual fixed asset investment and are uniformly distributed by the government. In 1959, the contract labor system was abolished, Party A and Party B were cancelled at the same time, and the piece rate system was abolished. Workers receive monthly remuneration, which is guaranteed by the state finances. In 1962, the summary of the Great Leap Forward's experience ushered in the restoration of the labor contract system, the labor quota management system also resumed, and an employee congress system was established within the enterprise. This time the labor contract system lasted for 8 years and was abolished again in 1970. At this time, the state abolished the "one committee and three ministries", rebuilt the National Capital Construction Commission, and implemented a "recurrent fee" system. The state paid wages and management fees directly to construction workers in accordance with roughly the same standards. In short, in the early socialist period, the employment forms developed in the construction industry were still formal employment systems dominated by state-owned construction enterprises. By 1980, state-owned construction enterprises employed 4.82 million employees, urban and rural collective enterprises employed 1.66 million and 3.34 million, respectively, while private construction enterprises employed only about 40,000 to 10,000 employees. Despite the lack of a formal and sound legal system to guarantee it, wage arrears rarely occur. Under the system where management and labor are integrated, labor is uniformly arranged and distributed by the state, and national or local finances provide sufficient guarantees for workers' wages. For most workers, no matter they are recruited from the military or rural areas, once they are hired by state-owned enterprises as fixed employees, they can enjoy the same social status and benefits distribution as other state-owned enterprises. At that time, not only was the labor force non-commoditized, but the labor-management relationship itself also had a paternalistic component, giving workers a sense of protected security. A worker in Jiangsu recalled that the tiredness of working at the time of the collective was different from the tiredness of the current time. "At that time, tired, tell your head, they will help you; but now, people will say," I give you Money '. "

The labor contract system under marketization today's re-emergence of the labor contract system can be traced back to the reforms of the 1980s. Under the dominance of modernity discourse, efficiency goes beyond guarantee to become the country's primary concern. Following Deng Xiaoping's affirmation of the production potential of the construction industry, a series of market reform measures were introduced into the construction industry: restructuring the existing management system, opening the construction market, allowing state-owned enterprises to operate independently, establishing a bidding system, and improving management technology. In 1980, the State promulgated the "Regulations on Contracts for Contracts for Construction and Installation Works", which allows construction enterprises to establish contracting relationships with construction units. At the same time, construction enterprises have begun to implement an internal contracting system that restricts labor employment, allowing internal employees to undertake profit contracting under the conditions of hiring the employees of the original unit. The wind of reform first spread in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. By 1981, more than 90% of urban industrial construction projects had reintroduced the contracting system. In 1984, the results of the reform of the contract system were officially recognized. In September, the State Council issued the Interim Provisions on Several Issues concerning the Reform of the Construction Industry and the Infrastructure Management System, emphasizing the full implementation of the construction project investment responsibility system, project bidding contracting system, construction fund allocation and loan, etc., and reforming the construction and installation enterprise employment system. . It was clearly stated that "state-owned construction and installation enterprises should gradually reduce the proportion of permanent workers. In the future, in addition to the necessary technical backbone, in principle, they will no longer recruit permanent workers, actively promote the labor contract system, and increase the proportion of contract workers." In November, The State Planning Commission and the Ministry of Construction jointly issued the "Interim Provisions on Tendering for Construction Projects", which further recognized the bidding system and encouraged shortening of bidding time and cost. Since then, the experience of project contracting and subcontracting has begun to spread across the country. The number of construction workers also rose sharply, reaching 17.28 million in 1985, more than double that in 1978. The modern labor contract system began to sprout. On the one hand, some internal contractors of state-owned enterprises began to separate from the original enterprises and hired rural labor to become the earliest modern contractor. On the other hand, some master workers in the countryside also started to take their villagers out to work, forming another large group of contract workers. At that time, the villagers needed a letter of introduction from the brigade before going out, and some paid one yuan a day to the brigade during part-time work, commonly known as "black contract workers." Around the 1990s, market-oriented reforms in the construction industry were further deepened. After the "two shifts" reform tone was determined at the Fourth Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee, the first "Building Law" of New China was promulgated in March 1998. The construction industry's code of practice has been made clearer. However, the construction unit's only practice of reducing costs has opened up favorable space for informal employment. On the one hand, many state-owned and restructured construction enterprises have started to make profits by providing anchorages. On the other hand, the contractor obtains construction permits by affiliating with state-owned construction enterprises, and then uses traditional social relations to recruit labor from the countryside, forming the main force of the construction industry. Since then, rural young people have flooded into the labor market in the construction industry in large numbers at low prices, and have become semi-commodity labor. The so-called "semi-commercialization" means that the labor force of construction workers cannot even qualify for complete commodities, and their living conditions are worse than the situation of full commercialization: after selling their labor, construction workers often cannot get it on time. Corresponding labor compensation.

Is the flexible accumulation of capital the contractor really the source of the evil of wage arrears? If there is no "black heart" contractor, will wage arrears still exist? Our answer is that the contractor is not the only source, nor is it the most important. Even without the contractor who absconded with the money, the problem of wage arrears will still exist. It is true that the contractor is very important in the process of salary payment. However, the key to whether a construction worker can get his salary smoothly is not to see if the contractor will deduct his salary, but to see if he can afford it. The Hebei contractor Wang, who has been working for more than 10 years, said: "Someone in the south building, someone (another contractor), led more than 10 people to work there. After working for a season, they would not be able to do it, and they would not be paid. He was After the wheat, I wo nt be able to pay until the autumn. He ca nt afford it, (needs tens of thousands). Like me, if you make two classes, there are few people now, and all seasons (requires pad) 3 Ten thousand; if I lead a class, it will be sixty thousand to seventy thousand yuan. I also have a little difficulty this season. "In many cases, the contractor himself is also a target of wage and profit default. After Wang had worked in the local government for more than 10 years, almost every project department had arrears that he could not recover. Furthermore, a master engineer from Sichuan described the construction industry as a "100 million driving 1 billion" industry. For a project costing 1 billion yuan, the developer only needs to invest the initial 100 million yuan, and the subsequent 900 million yuan can be paid by the construction company, labor service company, large contractor, and small contractor at all levels. In other words, the process of starting and implementing a construction project is a process of capital involvement step by step. When we asked a project manager who had been working for many years why he did not cancel the contract work system, he replied from the perspective of capital operation, "the contractor cannot be cancelled because the contractor is very important as a buffer zone between the construction company and the workers." The main role of the "buffer zone" is as follows: First, as the "boss" who directly deals with workers, the contractor often plays the role of a pressure reducing valve when wages are in arrears. Construction workers usually hand over their wages to the contractor after the work. This avoids direct negotiations between a single company and large-scale workers, decomposes the one-to-many payment relationship step by step, and reduces it to zero, greatly reducing the risk of large-scale labor union protests; on the other hand, the integration of labor-management relations In acquaintance relationships, the dual effects of sentiment and trust further reduce the possibility of workers' resistance.

Secondly, the contractor, as the direct object of workers' wage recovery, often bears the crime of "black boss" and has become a scapegoat for the moral destruction of superior construction or contracting companies. On the eve of the wheat harvest in June 2008, when the contractor Yang couldn't pay the workers on time, even though the workers had learned that the general contracting company owed Yang a project payment, they still insisted that Yang was incapable of building construction. The company doesn't give him money. When faced with wage arrears, most workers do not first hold the construction company accountable, but condemn the morale or incompetence of the contractor. Of course, there are also cases in which contract laborers arbitrarily owe workers wages, refuse to pay, and even hire thugs to oppress workers.

It is not difficult to see that under the modern contract labor system, the decentralization of management responsibilities to the level of contract workers pushed construction workers into a sheltered labor-management relationship. The labor relationship between the company and the workers is hidden behind the scenes, and only informal relationships between people have surfaced. Most of the workers we interviewed would think of a contractor when they mentioned their boss, and they didn't know which construction company was their true employer. By the time wages are in arrears, most people can think of the recovery object as the contractor.

On the one hand, traditional social relations cover a layer of tenderness and veil for labor-management relations, to some extent dispel the workers' resistance; on the other hand, the masked labor-management relations are like a chronic poison, greedily pursuing surplus in capital In the process of value, the traditional social trust system is constantly eroded and destroyed.

Looking back at the entire history of the development of the construction industry, the formation of the contract labor system in the construction industry is not inevitable, nor is it a product of the characteristics of the industry as everyone thinks. The essence of the problem lies in the changes in the form of capital accumulation, especially the institutional reforms that have taken place since the 1990s. The contract labor system is just a form of capital borrowed to cover up labor relations and cover up surplus value. Similar to the post-Fordist system that emerged in the West in the 1980s, the modern contract labor system is a manifestation of the flexible accumulation of capital. But in contrast, modern contract labor has weaker bargaining power in the presence of capital, and the bargaining method has become more violent.

What is "violent salary"?

In recent years, the media has frequently reported construction workers' wage-seeking incidents, ranging from self-destruction in which they climbed a tower crane to seek suicide, to personal injuries by attacking the project department and assaulting packers. From this we can see a very obvious "violent" color. However, digging deeper, the root cause behind construction workers' "violent wage-seeking" behavior is the hidden capital and the violence imposed on the construction workers by the entire construction system. The "violent wage-seeking" incident reminds us that economic prosperity should no longer be at the cost of unscrupulous social harm. Today, while we are proud of the rise of the great powers and proud of the success of the Olympic Games, we should reflect on the absurd existence of the modern labor contract system behind the prosperity. When we enjoy a completely renewed modern urban civilization, we should reflect on whether it was built in a civilized and humanistic way.

We believe that to change the unreasonable employment system in the construction industry, it is necessary to fully mobilize the national and social forces, increase the management and supervision of relevant departments, and implement relevant policies and legal provisions. First of all, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development should strengthen the supervision function, and further implement measures such as eliminating the labor contract system, establishing a migrant worker's salary guarantee system, and establishing a base management. If this is not the case, the illegal subcontracting system in the construction industry will continue to exist and illegal construction practices on construction sites will not be banned.

Secondly, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security should vigorously promote the new "Labor Contract Law", requiring construction companies to sign labor contracts with workers, on the one hand, reducing exploitation in the subcontracting process of labor services, and on the other hand, strengthening workers' legal awareness and ability to defend rights according to law . Of the more than 200 construction workers we interviewed, only two had ever signed a labor contract with a labor service company, but the contract only stipulated the operating rules and daily wage standards that bound the workers, and did not mention the payment period of wages, work injury insurance And other issues related to workers' rights. If more than 90% of construction workers have not signed a labor contract, who should bear this responsibility?

Finally, the ACFTU should set an example and set a good example. On the one hand, the establishment of trade unions on the construction site is implemented, and on the other hand, in the case of infringement and lack of protection of construction workers' rights, they will provide assistance as soon as possible. At this stage, most workers on the construction site do not have a union organization. Who should support and protect them when their rights are violated?