Fifty-one migrant workers have been elected municipal lawmakers
in Chongqing, the first time in the southwest China city, a local
official said Friday.
They will have their own say at an annual session of the local
legislature, which is to convene on January 20, representing about
7 million migrant workers in Chongqing, one of the largest cities
in China, Zhou Bo, a spokesman for the municipal government, told
reporters.
They were elected out of 149 candidates in 30 districts and
counties of Chongqing, and took up 5.86 percent of the total 870
seats at the local legislative body, or the Chongqing Municipal
People's Congress.
"They have been given trainings on how to fulfil their duties as
deputies to the Municipal People's Congress," Zhou said.
China has more than 120 million migrant workers, most of whom
are farmers from poor rural areas. They travel to the cities to
work in construction, mining, cleaning and catering industries, or
the kind of jobs usually labeled "dirty", "heavy", "hard" and
"exhausting".
For long, they had no their own representatives in local or
national legislatures, and discrimination and prejudice against
migrant workers is still common among urban Chinese.
News reports have frequently exposed infringements of their
rights, such as unpaid wages.
In 2002, a migrant worker, Zhu Linfei, was elected deputy to the
local People's Congress in Yiwu, a city in east China's Zhejiang
Province, becoming the first among his peers to enter a legislative
body.
China's top legislature, the National People's Congress (NPC),
adopted a resolution last March, providing for rural migrant worker
representatives in the national parliament for this year's full
session.
After that, a number of provinces and cities, such as Shanghai,
Jiangsu, Guangdong and Shanxi, have elected new local lawmakers
from among migrant workers.
(Xinhua News Agency January 12, 2008)