Labor Inspection Good Practices in China Grid and Network Based Managment of Labor Inspection Labor Inspection Good Practices in China

Meeting challenges Increasing number of employers and employees challenges the labor law enforcement capacity. With the rapid progress of city and countryside integration, the traditional supervision scope has to be expanded from the urban areas alone to both urban and rural areas.

In comparison with the number of labor inspectorates, shortage in labor forces and inadequate financial resources are still outstanding problems existing in labor inspection institutes at the grass-root level. In correspond with challenges, the labor inspection institutes make efforts to find new approaches to inspection to achieve adequate coverage for all employers. Recently, China’s labor inspection institutes have launched an innovation project on the labor inspection management so as to expand the supervision scope from the urban areas alone to both urban and rural areas and promote active and preventive labor inspection management.

Why to launch the pilot project? The new supervision model aims to realize the complete coverage of all employer units and establish information management system. With application of the project, the labor inspectorates can carry out comprehensive and dynamic inspection on employers so as to prevent and eliminate labor dispute. It will not only save manpower and financial resources, but also avoid the overlap of investigation. In addition, it will lay the foundation for further analysis on the inter-relationships among different factors so as to achieve classified supervision.

What is Grid based management? Grid based management is the classification of administrative districts into grids based on sub-district (township) or communities in accordance with the number of employing units and workers under the jurisdictions. Accordingly, a certain number of inspectors and labor inspection assistants are assigned to each grid with clearly defined duties and work tasks. Except of conducting inspection, another main task of them is to continuously update the employer units’ information from various channels, including regular visit inspection, inspections upon reporting and complaints, desk review inspection, and special inspections etc.

What are the roles of the grid based management? Collection of information. The basic information and labor information of the employing units in the grid are collected through the visits by labor inspectors, information files are established accordingly. Regular equivalent information exchange will be carried out. Building up information files for each employer will help inspectors to realize comprehensive supervision of targeted employers under their responsible area.

Legal awareness publicity Legal awareness publicity. While labor inspectors carry out field visits, they are responsible to publicize labor related laws, regulation and rules. It will actively promote the legal awareness of employers and enhance the knowledge of the lawful labor use. Prevention and pre-warning. During the process of the information collection, labor inspectors have a chance to carry out timely detection and correction for the minor violations of laws, and timely report and rapidly address major violations activities.

What is the Network based management? Network based management of the labor inspection is the building of labor inspection information management system, the building of the labor inspection management platform, the integration and the use of the supervision information in the realization of the informational transformation, standardized law enforcement and the integrated oversight of the labor inspection management.

What are the roles of network based management?  Information aggregation and sharing. Employment information, workers’ reports and complaints information, investigation information of cases and information of inspectors will be incorporated into the information management system. And exchanging and sharing of the information would be realized within internal organizations of the human resources and social security administration and the working system of other relevant departments.

Information comparison and dynamic supervision Information comparison and dynamic supervision. Comparison of above information collected from different channels will be carried out so as to analyze the labor use of the employing units. That will help inspectors timely detect the violation clues of the employing unites based on the information analysis report. Dynamic supervision of the employing units will be achieved finally.  Information feedbacks and cases management. Law-violation information shall be collectively fed back to the labor inspection information management platform to realize unified cases management and unified law enforcement forces allocation as well as unified supervision of case investigation and punishment. It will help to set up scientific and transparent law enforcement management system. In this system, labor inspection resources will be allocated properly and the overall process of case handling will be closely supervised.

Statistics analysis and classified supervision Statistics analysis and classified supervision. Assessment report of employers’ law observance status will be provided to inspectors in accordance with relevant data analysis. Different categories of employers in respect of labor law observance status will be treated differently. The classified supervision will be applied. Those employers with persistent law-abiding record will be given labor inspection exemption, and those employers with repeated breaches record or persistent and significant poor compliance record will be inspected frequently. In 2009, the Chinese government launched pilot projects of grid based management and network based management in 60 cities.

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