Pricing Labour Capacity: The Unexpected Effects of Formalizing Employment Contracts in China

This paper analyses the effects of recent laws formalising employment contracts in China, part of a wider policy to normalise features of an emerging market economy. Using a unique hand-collected dataset of 294 industrial injury claims handled by a labour dispute arbitration commission in 2010, we study the impact of having a formal contract on the amount of compensation paid to victims of workplace accidents. An inherent feature of the employment contract under a market economy is its incompleteness: because work-effort bargain and labour capacity cannot be accurately specified ex ante, the employer can expropriate the surplus from production ex post. The legally-driven formalisation of employment contracts is intended to redress this effect by holding the employer to the terms of the parties’ agreement and proving for third party enforcement. Our empirical analysis shows that having a written employment contract makes an injury claim more than twice likely to be arbitrated than mediated, in line with the intended effect of the law, but that it also leads to a reduction of around half in the amount of compensation awarded. Formalisation of employment contracts may reduce employer discretion during the course of the employment relationship, but it also makes it difficult for workers to invoke actual or customary wage levels for the purposes of putting a value on an accident compensation claim, in the face of the formal wage stated in the contract. Formalisation ends up reinforcing the hierarchical power of the employer which is a feature of capitalist work relations.