Abstract: Current research on the rights of rural migrant workers has failed to give due attention to their attitudes toward rights protection. Moreover, neither the quiet changes in the scale and structure of rural migrant workers nor the relations between current employerworker conflicts and laborers’ mass incidents have received indepth discussion. Based on the survey data gathered in the Yangtze River Delta, this paper summarizes the Impact Model of rural migrant workers’ desire to defend their rights on three dimensionscohort, work experience and work unit feature. Here are the findings: (1) Cohort was an important factor affecting the rural migrant workers’ desire to defend labor rights. The rightsdefending desire gradually got stronger from earlier cohorts (before 1969) to the 1990 cohort. (2) Legal awareness affected significantly the workers’ desire towards rights protection. (3) Variables related to work experience, such as frequency of changing jobs and successful experience of defending rights had no significant effects; the only exception was job position. (4) Contradictory to the finding of work unit feature being an insignificant factor in most studies, this study found it significant. (5) To some extent, the level of institutionalization of work unit management could explain how the unit feature worked, i.e., the more advanced the institutionalization of the unit management, the stronger desire to defend labor rights. An indepth analysis discovered that, in addition to the influences from the work unit and the state institutional contexts, rural migrant workers’ desire to defend rights was a function of three internal forces in integration, i.e., emotion, human capital and social experience. Among all, education, legal awareness and job position were important factors that affected migrant workers’ rightsdefending desire significantly. In accordance to the reality of China’s rapid economic and social development, rural migrant workers’ awareness of rights protection will continue to improve, and this may create pressure on the existing labor rights system.

Key words: cohort , work experience , work unit feature , desire to defend rights , rural migrant worker