Chinese grads reject factory jobs
EDUCATED YOUNG WORKERs prefer to be unemployed than take work they feel is beneath them
GUANGZHOU, CHINA — This city of 15 million on the Pearl River is the hub of a manufacturing region where factories make everything from T-shirts and shoes to auto parts, tablet computers and solar panels. Many factories are desperate for workers, despite offering double-digit annual pay increases and improved benefits.
Wang Zengsong is desperate for a steady job. He has been unemployed for most of the three years since he graduated from a community college here after growing up on a rice farm. Wang, 24, has worked only several months at a time in low-paying jobs, once as a shopping mall guard, another time as a restaurant waiter and most recently as an office building security guard.
But he will not consider applying for a full-time factory job because Wang, as a college graduate, thinks that is beneath him. Instead, he searches every day for an office job, which would initially pay as little as a third of factory wages.
“I have never and will never consider a factory job — what’s the point of sitting there hour after hour, doing repetitive work?” he asked.
Millions of recent college graduates in China like Wang, 24, are asking the same question. The result is an anomaly: Jobs go begging in factories, while many educated young workers are unemployed or underemployed. A national survey of urban residents, released this winter by a Chinese university, showed that among youths in their early 20s, those with a college degree were four times as likely to be unemployed as those with only an elementary school education.
It is a problem that Chinese officials are acutely aware of.
“There is a structural mismatch — on the one hand, the factories cannot find skilled labour, and on the other hand the universities produce students who do not want the jobs available,” said Ye Zhihong, a deputy secretary general of China’s Education Ministry.
China’s swift expansion in education over the past decade, including a quadrupling of the number of college graduates each year, has cre- ated millions of engineers and scientists. The best can have their pick of jobs at Chinese companies that are aiming to become even more competitive globally.
But China is also churning out millions of graduates with few marketable skills, coupled with a conviction that they are entitled to office jobs with respectable salaries.
Wang and other young, educated Chinese without steady jobs pose a potential long-term challenge to social stability. They spend long hours surfing the Internet, getting together with friends and complaining about the shortage of office jobs for which they believe they were trained.
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao acknowledged in March that only 78 per cent of the previous year’s college graduates had found jobs. But even that figure may overstate employment for the young and educated.
The government includes not just people in long-term jobs but also freelancers, temporary workers, graduate students and people who have signed job contracts but not started work yet, as well as large numbers of people in make-work jobs that statecontrolled companies across China have been ordered to create for new graduates.
Yin Weimin, the minister of human resources and social security, said in a speech last spring that “the major emphasis will be on solving the employment problem among college graduates.”
Wang is the youngest of four children. He was born in late 1987, as the “one child policy” was barely beginning to be enforced in rural areas. His less-educated siblings have also been leery of taking well-paid factory jobs.
China has a millenniumsold Confucian tradition in which educated people do not engage in manual labour. But its economy still largely produces blue-collar jobs. Manufacturing, mining and construction represent 47 per cent of China’s economic output, twice their share in the United States, and the service sector is far less developed.
The glut of college graduates is eroding wages even for those with more market-
“I have never and will never consider a factory job — what’s the point of sitting there hour after hour, doing repetitive work?”
WANG ZENGSONG,
UNEMPLOYED COLLEGE GRADUATE
able majors, like computer science. In 2000, the prevailing wage at top companies for fresh graduates with computer science degrees was about $725 a month in Shenzhen, roughly 10 times the wage then of a blue-collar worker who had not finished high school, said an executive who insisted on anonymity because of controversy in China over wages.
But today, new computer science graduates are so plentiful that their pay in Shenzhen has fallen to just $550 a month, less than double the wage of a blue-collar worker.
If Wang were willing to take a factory job, his inter- est in indoor design might take him to Hongyuan Furniture, a manufacturer of home saunas a 45-minute drive from his home.
The factory now offers newcomers 2,500 renminbi a month, about $395, before overtime. Six-person dorm rooms have been replaced with two-person apartments. Workers no longer have to hand over part of their wages to the foreman. Instead, the factory now pays a bonus to foremen of $8 to $16 for each month that a new blue-collar employee stays on the job. Yet the factory still struggles to find workers.
The company’s labour costs per worker — wages plus benefits — have been rising 30 per cent or more each year. That is faster than the national pace of 21 per cent for migrant workers, although there have been signs that pace may have slowed recently with a broader deceleration in the Chinese economy. And it is considerably faster than the 13 per cent annual increase in minimum wages — roughly three times inflation — that the government has mandated through 2015.
Plenty of college graduates apply for jobs at the company, but they are not desperate enough to accept blue-collar tasks, Ni said. The sauna fac- tory has better ventilation than many Chinese factories, but it is not air-conditioned. The many power tools kick up a fine mist of sawdust that coats every surface — not the sort of place where a college graduate can go to work in a dress shirt and then head straight to a restaurant or nightclub in the evening.
One unusual social dynamic created by the one-child policy is that many college graduates are only children with parents and grandparents who continue to nurture them into adulthood.
“Their parents, their grandparents give them money; they have six people to support them,” Ni said. “They say, ‘Why do I need to work? I can stay home and get 2,000 renminbi a month, why should I get on a bus every day to earn 2,500 a month?’ ”
That is how Wang has managed to get by without a job. Despite some grumbling, his parents send him money to help support his modest lifestyle.
As was common in rural China until very recently, his mother never went to school while his father attended elementary school for several years before dropping out. Now in their 60s, his parents had to give up their rice farm when the local government redeveloped the land it was on; Wang’s father does odd jobs as a construction worker to help support his son.
Not surprisingly, Wang’s parents have urged Wang to take one of the many factory jobs available. “You can get paid 4,000 renminbi ($635) a month for taking such work, but I wouldn’t do it,” Wang said. “Your hands are dirty, you’re all dirty. It’s not for me.”
As hundreds of thousands of factories have opened across the country over the past decade, they have struggled to find workers who can operate their complicated equipment, much less fix it. Yet the number of those receiving vocational training has stagnated to the point that they are now outnumbered roughly two to one by students pursuing more academic courses of study.
China’s vocational secondary schools and training programs are unpopular because they are seen as dead-ends, with virtually no chance of moving on to a four-year university. They also suffer from a stigma: They are seen as schools for people from peasant backgrounds and are seldom chosen by more affluent and better-educated students from towns and cities.
Many youths from rural areas who graduate from college, like Wang, are also hostile to factory jobs. He is toying with other ideas to earn a living, but learning vocational skills is not one of them. One idea is to buy rabbits from wholesalers in the countryside, set out a mat along a Guangzhou street and sell the animals as pets or food.
When told that this might involve competing with older, uneducated rural migrants willing to work for almost nothing as sidewalk vendors, he shrugged and reiterated his hostility to factory labour.
“I’m not afraid of hard work; it’s the lack of status.”