A year after new labor laws took effect, more employers signed employment contracts with their workers while more labor conflicts broke out, said a senior socialist on Monday.

The new laws have effective impacts on China's employment relations, said Chen Guangjin, deputy director of the Institute of Sociology under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), when elaborating a report on China's social changes in 2008.

This year China issued two important labor laws, the labor contract law and one on arbitration of labor conflicts. In addition, there was a regulation on the labor contract law implementation and a rule on paid leave.

A Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security survey showed that 90 to 96 percent of employees signed contracts with their employers after the labor contract law took effect on Jan. 1 this year.

"Our investigation showed the figure might not be that high but we did find a notable increase," Chen said.

Meanwhile, the number of labor cases at the arbitration agencies increased a lot, he said. "The number increased by 30 to 50 percent generally but it doubled and even was three times of before in eastern Jiangsu Province and the Pearl River Delta (China's two manufacturing centers)."

The same tendency was also found among labor cases taken to the court, he added.

In most of these cases, conflicts broke out in private companies over salary, compensation for work-related injury and insurance, he said.

"We found that more and more employees stepped out to argue and protect their own rights. Some arguments are new," he said. But he did not explained what the new arguments were.

(Xinhua News Agency December 16, 2008)