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Workers falling through skills gap |
![[Photo of Job Hunters in China]](/images/articles/people/civilians/chineseworkers.jpg) As China battles to reduce unemployment, analysts say it is shortage of skilled workers, not jobs, that is causing problems.
Song Yongliang did everything right. He worked hard, went to college and majored in Russian, which he thought would be practical in his hometown in Northeast China.
In his senior year, he found an internship as a translator and hoped to find a job with a trading company near the Russian border after he graduated in 2008. Then the financial crisis hit.
Trading companies cut back on hiring and, for a graduate with minimal experience, Song's prospects looked grim, forcing him to take whatever jobs he could find. He worked as a translator in Beidaihe, a seaside town in Hebei province, and on Hainan Island, and even spent a brief, unhappy period at a relative's alcohol factory in Shandong province.
Frustrated but unbowed, the 28-year-old eventually made his way to Beijing, where he found work as a salesman and then a recruiter for a private school. The pay was meager, the hours were long, and as time went on, it became more difficult to hide his disappointment.
"I went to college, spent all that money, and yet you can make more money working as a security guard or a waiter here," he said.
Song's experience highlights what experts say is an increasingly large gap between the kinds of jobs that are available in China and the skills and interests of workers able to fill them.
Although particularly acute for college graduates, the situation extends across the Chinese economy, all the way down to the country's millions of migrant workers. Indeed, some economists argue that the new challenge for Beijing is not a lack of jobs - Song, after all, found at least six - but a lack of jobs that fit the people looking for them.
A recent survey by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security found that demand for workers was up 15% compared to last year. A serious labor shortage has been reported in the Pearl River Delta, where factories may need at least 2 million more workers to meet demand. According to human resources consultants Towards Watson, salaries have risen rapidly in China in recent of years, and will grow by about 10% this year.
Yet unemployment remains high. The government's official figure of 4.2% only counts those who register as unemployed, excluding migrant workers and those who choose not to tell the government. A survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) estimated that real unemployment in China was actually closer to 9.4% in 2008. (A recent report to the State Council proposed an official national survey that is released to the public. Analysts say it could be approved soon.)
In addition, for the past decade, the number of people of working age has increased about 10 million annually, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That is the equivalent of adding more than the entire population of New York City to the Chinese economy every year.
"There is a pretty clear contradiction in the labor market," said Zhang Juwei, a professor and director of the labor and social security research center at the CASS. "Many businesses can't find workers but, at the same time, many people can't find jobs either."
"It will definitely be a hot topic," said Lian Si, a professor at the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE) who authored a book on urban communities of struggling graduates called Ant Tribe. "The government is paying a lot of attention to this problem."
Another reason college graduates have struggled to find work is that there are simply too many of them - a legacy of the government's efforts in 1999 to simultaneously improve the quality of the workforce and fight unemployment by dramatically expanding the country's higher education system. That year, college enrollment was increased by about 47% to 1.6 million students. The result, however, was not quite what was intended: a huge increase in the number of graduates that the Chinese economy remains unable to absorb to this day.
In 2008, there were 5.59 million new graduates and about 1 million did not find jobs. Last year, 6.11 million students graduated, and according to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, 87% found jobs. Analysts say that number is vastly inflated because of both dishonest reporting by colleges and the fact that, like Song, many graduates were forced to accept low paying jobs they did not want.
These unemployed and underemployed graduates and laid-off migrant workers could be a catalyst for instability - a fact that partially explains the government's attention to the issue, analysts say.
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