Labor disputes are on the up, especially between migrant workers and their employers, with conflicts pertaining to social welfare measures such as pensions topping the list of grievances, a survey released yesterday has revealed.

Jobs lost due to last year's financial crisis, when companies across China responded by drastic cost cuts, was another trigger for patchy relations between employers and the employed, the Blue Book of China's Society survey brought out by the Social Sciences Academic Press has shown.

Yet, unlike earlier rows that focused on wage hikes, the disputes this time relate more to bettering social security cover.

And, topping that list is the issue of pensions to the country's earliest batch of migrant workers, the survey showed.

"The first generation of migrant workers who entered the labor market in the 1980s is facing retirement," Li Peilin, director of the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said during the release of the survey. "The phenomena (disputes) will become more acute in the days to come."

The nation's courts dealt with nearly 170,000 labor disputes in the first half of the year, an increase of 30 percent over the same period last year, the survey revealed, without specifying how many of these disputes related to migrant workers and their employers.

Courts in the coastal provinces in southeast China heard more such cases, with the number increasing by as much as 150 percent there, Li said during the conference in Beijing.

"Labor disputes are the ones that have seen the highest increase among all civil legal cases (in the country)," said Li.

There is, however, some good news on the jobs front, the survey pointed out. The labor market, especially for migrant workers, is showing signs of recovery as the global financial crisis wanes, it said.

Migrant workers - most of whom were employed in export-oriented units - were the first group to be hit by job losses when the financial crisis hit last year.

In fact, during the Spring Festival this year, around 12 million migrant workers, or about 8.5 percent of the total number of such workers, were estimated to have lost their jobs and returned home.

The survey, however, revealed that since August this year, employers in traditional manufacturing bases such as Dongguan and Shenzhen had started recruiting people.

The up-tick has come as a big surprise, and trumped earlier forecasts that jobless migrant workers were returning in large numbers to their respective villages, Li said.

In fact, the number of migrant workers who returned to work in cities by October this year touched 97 percent of the number seen before the financial crisis rocked the world in August last year, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Securities said.

"The impact of the financial crisis, however, continues to be felt even now," Li said. "We are expecting that our economy and job market will take a long time to recover fully."