LAWFUEL – The Legal Newswire – China’s top legislature on Sunday started to read the draft law on labor dispute mediation and arbitration amid an increasing number of labor disputes that emerged in the country.
ChinaView.cn reports that the draft law was submitted Sunday to the seven-day 29th session of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), or China’s top legislature, for the first reading.
According to NPC statistics, labor dispute cases in China are continuously increasing in recent years. Statistics show that labor dispute arbitration organizations at various levels dealt with 1.72 million labor dispute cases involving 5.32 million employees from 1987 to the end of 2005, with a growth rate of 27.3percent annually.
Xin Chunying, vice Chairman of the Legislative Affairs Commission of the NPC Standing Committee said on the legislative session that excepting the increasing number of labor disputes, other problems also exist. For instance, the personnel in arbitration organizations are not professional and thus lack credibility and the process of arbitrating labor disputes is long, making the cost of arbitration high.
China resumed the labor dispute arbitration system in 1987 and formed the procedures for coping with labor disputes as “mediation, arbitration and trial” after the regulation on handling corporate labor dispute and Labor Law were promulgated in 1993 and 1994.
The procedure and practice for dealing with labor disputes have been widely accepted by the public, said Xin.
The draft bill is for strengthening mediation and improving arbitration so as to help fairly solve labor disputes without going to court and thus safeguard employee’s legitimate rights and promote social harmony, she said.
