By Zhang Yunhua, Research Department of Rural Economy, DRC; Zhang Chen, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences & Kong Xiangzhi, Renmin University of China

Research Report, No.19, 2021 (Total 6084) 2021-2-20

Abstract: With the aid of web crawler technology, this paper collects more than 26,000 demands raised by rural migrant workers on the message board of People’s Daily Online from 2011 to 2020, makes a quantitative analysis of these demands through methods such as Chinese word segmentation and word frequency statistics, and illustrates the demands of migrant workers in the course of getting engaged in social activities. The analysis results based on their demands are related respectively to salary increase, labor rights and interests protection, government-subsidized housing, children’s education, business startups in hometowns, social security and urban household registration and settlement. In light of the migrant workers’ demands, we need to establish a normal interest appeal mechanism for 290 million migrant workers so that they could express their complaints through a smooth channel. With regard to the improvement of relevant supportive policies for them, we need to take comprehensive measures to ensure that migrant workers could get their legal pay, flesh out the system to protect their labor rights and interests, take multiple measures to solve their housing issues in cities, improve the design of the education system for their children, encourage and support them to start up businesses in their hometowns, speed up the construction of social security system and continue to deepen reform of household registration system.

Keywords: rural migrant workers, demands, complaints, web crawler technology