Summer Project of 2005

有这样一群人，他们将城市建设得更加繁华，却默默无闻；白天辛勤劳作，晚上却蜷缩在城市的角落；他们工作在城市，家却在农村。我们称他们为农民工。

有这样一群人，他们生长在农村，却向往着城市；他们憧憬着美好的未来，却又有一丝自卑；他们正是青春飞扬，却不得不背负上沉重的负担。有一天他们会走进城市，成为我们所称的农民工。

还有这样一群人，他们身处大都市广州，接受着大学的高等教育，踌躇满志地编织着自己的美好未来。但是他们并不仅仅醉心于追求自己的生活幸福，还希望自己能够帮助需要帮助的人，让更多的人生活幸福。他们是来自广东商学院的大学生志愿者。

在刚刚过去的暑假里，由广东商学院社工系举办的务工青年岗前培训将这三群人联系在了一起。

中国是一个农业大国，十三亿人口就有8亿农民，现在将近１．５亿的农民在外务工，打工者数量还在以每年５００万人的速度递增（国农业大学人文与发展学院教授叶敬忠）但是在目前的情况下，许多进城务工的农民朋友的诸多权益无法得到应有的保护，所以在农村青年进城以前对其进行岗前培训是十分必要的。

于是务工青年岗前培训项目在广商启动了······

Project Background

Until May 2003, the total value of 12 months export from China is $3660 billions USD, which ranked 4th in the world. The major reason why China wins the advantage of export is that it has a huge source of cheap labor force. The majority of all these cheap labor comes from the rural areas around the country in which they either become surplus labors due to losing their farmlands by urbanization or are unable to make living on their lands. According to a Survey done in 2000, the labors from the rural areas are up to 88,400,000.?These labors exclusively head to the economically developed regions and work hard pursuing the better life there and they are generally categorized into migrant workers distinguished from their urban counterparts. For example, 35.5% out of migrant workers are in Guangdong province, and most of them concentrate in the area of Zhujiang industrial Delta. Zhujiang industrial Delta, being made up of 7 cities including the capital of Guangdong province, Guangzhou, is thought the largest manufacturing base for the electrics, toys and shoes worldwide. Therefore, Zhujiang Delta could also be called as the factory for the world. 

Opposite to their original dream of better life, migrant workers actually become the synonymy with underclass group in society after they migrated to cities. According to a survey supported by European foundation, being carried out by the social work department of Guangdong Business College, showed that the migrant workers have to face a lot of ill-treatments, like delayed payment, extended overtime, deteriorating working environments and absence of special labor protection, especially to the females. Not restricted to these, industrial injury is also confronted by the migrant workers and the industrial injury has popped already out as the most destructive one threatening the migrant workers. A statistical data showed that in the process of modernization drive, multiple economic systems and economic globalization, the industrial safety in China has, since 1990s, loomed large and grown into an increasing concern of the society. As the industrial injury with rural identity takes up 80% or more of the whole, migrant workers from rural areas are the most suffered, thus turning the industrial safety into issue of the migrant workers. 

Zhujiang industrial Delta, as having a big number of migrant workers, is not an exception for this situation. And even further it has been notorious for its unbearable occurrence of the industrial injuries. A statistics data from a non-authoritative source indicates that over 30,000 cases of finger chopping (over 40,000 fingers are cut off) by machinery have been reported annually. In contrast with that 68.6% of the injured workers are working at the factories registered with Chinese government, 61.7% of the injured workers do not have any contract with their factories, over half the factories also do not get their employees working insurance. Thus after the worker got injured, up to 80% of the injured do not know what to do and how to do as well as where to get help. Even though sometimes they fortunately get some help, 58% to 78% of the help are from the families and friends instead of their employers or the society and the government. In the meantime, as high as 91.8% of those injured workers need legal consultation badly because they actually have very poor knowledge about how to deal with these issues. 

Behind this astounding figure of injuries lie the following hard facts: 1) the injured are more often than not at a lost to the sudden befall of the disaster; 2) a minority of the injured are compensated; 3) the injured are doomed to be dismissed later for one reason or another, losing the basic means of lives; 4) the administrative government agencies often shuffle out their responsibility of strengthening out for the injured and the injustice cannot be righted; and 6) few of the injured are aware of his rights to resort to legal action for their interests. Therefore, Insufficient training, unawareness of safety requirements, lengthened working hours, frequent overtimes, low payment, few rests, aging of machinery and mal-function of machines as well as high incidences of industrial injury and inaccessible compensation are all the phenomena. The ultimate causes for these painful facts should be exclusively rooted in the lack of attention or awareness of the rights deserved by migrant workers from government and employers as well as the migrant workers themselves. 

In current China, there are few organizations or institutes involved in the efforts to protect the rights of migrant workers and prevent them from various ill-treatments or industrial injury, which include the law school and social work department of Guangdong Business College, the Migrant Workers Legal Services of Panyu, Shengzhen Migrant Workers center and the Lawsuits Clinic under Law College of Sun Yat-sun University. Although they have been doing this job dedicatedly, the services they could provide at most are still far from enough to meet the demands. Actually a professional legal service system might be ideally effective and secure way to fulfill the right-protection for the growing population of migrant workers. 
Of course, we highly understand it is barely possible for China to build up a mature legal service system to help those migrant workers within a short period of time, but we could do it alternatively with an education project focused on the labor rights at a local place firstly, if not available nationwide in the beginning. The present application is just designated for this purpose. Although Chinese government is very sensitive for any kind of right, school might be a good place to be fund for a labor right project which the government would put less restriction on it than the outside of academic. Currently, China gets more than 12 millions college students, about 1/3 of them are from rural areas where the migrant workers come from, it could be easier for these students to communicate with the migrate workers based on their similar background. 

Fortunately, we got a grant from US-China legal cooperation fund to start the project in 2005 summer; the following are the stories for the project...