Migrant workers’ job-hopping a common trend

BEIJING: Wei Shengyi, a migrant worker in his 20s from a village in central China’s Anhui province, has had 10 jobs over the past three years.

After high school, Wei left his hometown to make a living as a migrant worker and, so far, he has worked as a serviceman, salesman, and mechanic in seven cities, including Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, for as little as one week and as long as five months.

His family jokes that he travels more than he works, but wei believes that he has to “drift” to gain more work experience before he can get a decent job with a satisfying salary.

Meanwhile, Peng Liang, who is also from Anhui, quit his job as a courier in Shanghai just several days ago because of the workload and unsatisfying salary, making it the fourth job he has left in two years.

Wei and Peng are examples of a common trend of “short employment” and “frequent job-hopping” among the vast number of migrant workers, especially those born after 1980, which account for 60.9% of the nation’s migrant labourers.

According to a report jointly released by Tsinghua University and Gzhong.cn, a professional website that provides free career services to the working class, 25% of migrant workers have changed jobs in the past seven months and 55% have changed jobs in the past 1.8 years.

Migrant workers stay at a job for an average of 2.2 years, or half as long as they did eight years ago.

But migrant workers born after 1980 keep at a job for 1.5 years and those born after 1990 stay about 10 months on average, according to the report.

Moreover, it takes an average of six months for them to find a new job, the report said.

Meanwhile, labour shortage problems are becoming increasingly apparent in China, which offers migrant workers more choices in the job market, said Du Yang, the director of the Labour and Human Capital division with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

But having more choices does not mean they are making more money.

Wei said that he had earned little money over the past two years.

A recent survey conducted jointly by Xinhua Insight and Gzhong.cn showed that nearly three-quarters of the migrant workers earned an annual net income of less than 20,000 yuan (RM9,571), and 23.4% of them expressed “discontent” with their current jobs. — Xinhua