Despite government figures to indicate China still has a contingent of 150
million migrant workers awaiting to be transferred from rural to urban areas,
signs have emerged to show that the country's labor resources is on a trend of
shrinkage.
Although southern booming Guangdong Province has sucked up more than 19
million migrant workers, its annual labor shortfall remained at two million.
Factories found it hard for them to employ migrant workers with low income any
more.
Shortfall of labor power has emerged not only in coastal booming towns, but
in inland cities. Central China's Henan Province, the country's most populous
province, for instance, has gone all out to expand textile and clothing
industries but the workforce in local textile and clothing mills was only 70
percent of what they had expected.
A latest survey from the Ministry of Labor and Social Security showed that in
2006, construction engineering and machine building enterprises in prosperous
coastal areas are willing to pay workers at least 1,000 yuan (about 125 US
dollars) per month, almost equal to the local monthly salary of college
graduates. But these enterprises paid 600 yuan to workers every month three
years ago.
Han Jun, director of the Research Center of Rural Economy under the
Development Research Center of the State Council, said that 20 percent of the
rural areas in China no longer have surplus labors at present.
Xinyang City of Henan Province had 3.5 million rural laborers, and 1.86
million of them, mostly young or middle-aged, had gone to work in major cities.
And the city hired at least 30,000 workers to pick tea this year owing to
intensive female labor outflow.
Cai Fang, a noted expert in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences,
acknowledged that although there will not be a shortfall of laborers in the
absolute number of trades and industries in the years ahead, the scarcity of
laborers will be felt in some areas and in some particular industries.
Since China initiated reform and opening-up policies in late 1970's, noted
Prof. Wen Tiejun with elite Remin University in Beijing, factories and
enterprises, obtaining cheap land thanks for governmental preferential policies
and mainly engaging in processing materials supplied by overseas firms, have
mushroomed in southern and eastern China cities.
The factories and enterprises reaped profits by capitalizing on cheap land
and labor resource, but did not establish their own brands and intellectual
properties, as they failed to inject enough input into research and development.
Therefore, overproduction and excessive competition emerged in the country's
manufacturing industries. For the sake of their survival, some factories kept
the salary at a low level for the workers without buying their social insurance,
Wen said, adding that poor salary and welfare system cooled the migrant workers'
zeal for working in cities.
And some rural labor began returning home because of poor welfare system for
migrant workers in cities.
Liu Shilong, a farmer in central Henan Province, said both of his two sons
have come back tilting farmland after years of work in cities, since they could
not stand heavy workload any more in their 40's and their current farmwork could
earn as much as working in cities.
