Labour
Shortage in China Soon
12
May 2007
The general
perception is that China has one thirds
surplus rural workers, in other words, it has
100 to 150 million unemployed labours in the
rural area. But the reality paints a quite
different picture.
Mr Cai further illustrated in
an interview with the state television
station that the current labour surplus is
mainly caused by a structural problem rather
than an oversupply of workers.
China's labour structure has
undergone a series of change in recent
decades. When the Economic Reform started
thirty years ago, rural labours accounted for
more than 76 percent of China’s total
working population; in 2005, it dropped to
64. The true figure is even lower, according
to Mr Cai, as many self-employed migrants
living in urban areas are still registered as
rural workers, while in cities those who were
retrenched from state-owned enterprises are
not counted as employed even after they have
returned to work in private sectors.
It is common for a country in
the transformation from agriculture economy
to industry economy to experience a shift
from labour surplus to labour shortage. What
is unique about China is the time that it has
taken for the transformation. Normally it
needs a hundred years to accomplish, in China
the circle is complete in just thirty years,
partly owning to the implementation of the One-Child
policy among the ethnic Han population.
The first sign of the labour
shortage appeared as early as in 2004 along
China's coastal areas, but now the trend has
been observed in the interior regions. Sooner
or later it will trigger a wage rise across
the board and an increase in total labour
costs of businesses.
It shall be a positive
development for China’s more than a hundred
million migrant labours, who have overworked
yet have been overlooked, are always
underpaid and sometimes unpaid.
During this so-called Labour
Day Golden Week, for instance, majority of
the migrant labours saw no gold: they have to
cope with the extra holiday expenses without
holiday pay.
Delaying and even denying wage
of the migrant labours, particularly in the
building and construction sector, was a huge
problem and still is a problem now, with
fatal consequences including death and bodily
harm heard from time to time. Once Prime
Minister Wen Jiabao had to go out his way to
demand the labour heads (包工头) to release wages owned to
their workers, so as to enable the migrant
labours to return home for a Chinese New Year
reunion.
