Dispatch Work in China: A Study from Case Records, Part I

Abstract

This article employs all basic-level court cases adjudged in 2012 involving “labor disputes” over “dispatch work” 劳务派遣 (in the Supreme People’s Court’s large database of court judgments) to clarify the practical and theoretical implications of the new legal category of “dispatch work relationships” 劳务关系, as opposed to the old-style “labor relationships” 劳动关系. The article examines also disputes between the new dispatch agencies and the workers they contract with to clarify how that dispatch-agency-to-workers-relationship is different both from the new “dispatch work relationship” and the old “labor relationship” between enterprises and their workers. These comparisons of the three different kinds of work relationships bring to light a black hole in labor law theory and practice, related to its construction of a severing of contracting from management and of the laborer’s “person” from the laborer’s “work.” The article concludes by placing dispatch work into the context of the globalized social and legal history of labor.