One Child Policy Creates Less Compliant Chinese Workers

July 25, 2010 - PRLog -- We remain a bit shaken by the report we ran earlier this week about the seemingly parlous state of the Chinese financial system.

But in the interim, it seems factories there are running full-out, and there is an on-going struggle to find workers.

If Wang Jinyan, an unemployed factory worker with a middle school education, had a résumé, it might start out like this:

“Objective: seeking well-paid, slow-paced assembly-line work
in air-conditioned plant with Sundays off, free wireless Internet and washing machines in dormitory. Friendly boss a plus.”

As she eased her way along a gantlet of recruiters in this manufacturing megalopolis one recent afternoon, Ms. Wang, 25, was in no particular rush to find a job.

An underwear company was offering subsidized meals and factory worker fashion shows.

The maker of electric heaters promised seven-and-a-half-hour days.

“If you’re good, you can work in quality control and won’t have to stand all day,” bragged a woman hawking jobs for a shoe manufacturer.

Ms. Wang flashed an unmistakable look of ennui and popped open an umbrella to shield her fair complexion from the South China sun.

“They always make these jobs sound better than they really are,” she said, turning away. “Besides, I don’t do shoes. Can’t stand the smell of glue.”

Assertive, self-possessed workers like Ms. Wang have become a challenge for the industrial titans of the Pearl River Delta

that once filled their mammoth workshops with an endless stream of pliant labor from China’s rural belly.

In recent months, as the country’s export-driven juggernaut has been revived and many migrants have found jobs closer to home,

the balance of power in places like Zhongshan has shifted, forcing employers to compete for new workers — and to prevent seasoned ones from defecting to sweeter prospects.

The shortage has emboldened workers and inspired a spate of strikes in and around Zhongshan that paralyzed Honda’s Chinese operations last month.

The unrest then spread to the northern city of Tianjin, where strikers briefly paralyzed production at a Toyota car plant and a Japanese-owned electronics factory.

Although the walkouts were quelled with higher salaries, factory owners and labor experts said that the strikes have driven home a looming reality that had been predicted by demographers:

the supply of workers 16 to 24 years old has peaked and will drop by a third in the next 12 years,

thanks to stringent family-planning policies that have sharply reduced China’s population growth.

In Zhongshan, many factories are operating with vacancies of 15 to 20 percent,

compelling some bosses to cruise the streets in their BMWs and Mercedeses in a desperate hiring quest during crunch time.

The other new reality, perhaps harder to quantify, is this:

young Chinese factory workers, raised in a country with rapidly rising expectations, are less willing to toil for long hours for appallingly low wages like dutiful automatons.

Guo Yuhua, a sociologist at Tsinghua University, said the new cohort of itinerant workers was better educated, Internet-savvy and covetous of the urban niceties they discovered after leaving the farm.

“They want a life just like city folk, and they have no interest in going back to being farmers,” said Ms. Guo, who studies China’s 230 million-strong migrant population.

But the more immediate challenge is to the Chinese export machine, which churns out about a third of China’s gross domestic product ...

To read more at http://www.economywatch.com’, go to: http://www.economywatch.com/in-the-news/one-child-policy-...

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