government, but these services transformed into tremendous economic interests and became the toll of government officials and companies to fill up their own pockets, thus underlining the dislocation and the lack of authority on the part of the government
From a legal standpoint, this case provides the opportunity to analyze the labor relations or employment service relations between the worker and the employer and demonstrates the legal problems and real predicaments caused by the inequities faced by peasant workers in an unfamiliar city or town during the period of China's systematic and social transformations. At the same time, the case's lengthy litigation and its high monetary costs reflect the ineffectiveness of the legal system in protecting the rights of migrant workers. Because the current system of judicature for labor disputes does not consider migrant workers' actual predicaments – the hearing system for the so-called “one judgment and two hearings” labor cases consists of an excessive number of appeal levels but a lack of time limitations – it actually becomes an unbearable burden on the workers. Although the existence of the law and the legal system empowers and emboldens the migrant workers to fight for their lawful rights, the adversities and the high economic costs involved in the process as well as the psychological costs cause the workers to become terrified of the law. As a result, the legal system's efficacy in safeguarding fairness and realizing justice is reduced.
Our study found that, although the workers took up a persistent and tenacious resistance, all of their acts of protests were passive, economic-based or reactionary. The workers themselves, the government, the courts and society as a whole all lacked the proactive and progressive power and means to materialize and protect entitlements. This was the principal reason that despite nearly three years of persistent struggle, the main claim of the workers in this case had not won any definitive support. These workers' awareness of rights was primarily based on economics. They adopted a number of types of collective actions that are currently accepted in the political framework, for example, group visits to government agencies to resent their complaints, blocking key traffic areas, petitioning for group labor dispute arbitration, civil litigation that resulted in numerous retrials, bring their case to prosecuting agencies, and seeking assistance from the Shenzhen Labor Bureau, the standing committee of the city's People's Congress, domestic and foreign media outlets and non-governmental labor service organizations.
However, in the course of studying this case and the social, political and economic structures behind it, we found that the workers' loss of economic rights could fend its source in the demise of their rights as citizens, their political rights, as well as their social and cultural rights. On this social ecological chain of multiplying powerlessness, the various types of rights and entitlements interact as both cause and effect. Civic and political rights serve as a foundation for the workers to obtain social status and political assurance, while they are a full prerequisite for the realization of economic entitlements.
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