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Required public records fees irk workers
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WHEN Annie Yang graduated from Fudan University eight years ago, she did not land a job right away. Yang, now 31, found a position a year later with a publisher in Shanghai.
She went to the Shanghai Education Human Resource Center and was asked for a one-year management fee about 200 yuan (US$32.40) for looking after her personal file, or dang’an — a series of documents that record key aspects Chinese people’s lives. Yet she was never allowed to peek inside. When the payment was made, the center then would send her personal file to her new workplace.
“I felt quite resentful the moment the staff of the Human Resource Center asked me for the money,” Yang tells Shanghai Daily. “They never let me know about the fee or what the cost was for. I actually would like to know if there were other choices.”
Yang is among millions of graduates in China who are either looking or once looked for their papers. In whichever case, they have to pay the money.
The revenues from the dang’an management fee are quite considerable. In Beijing, the government gets over 100 million yuan on public records administration charges every year. The figure is similar or even higher in Guangzhou, capital city of southern China’s Guangdong Province.
The total annual charge of dang’an in China has surpassed 1 billion yuan, according to the Beijing News.
Sam Li went to Beijing in 2002 and works at a private company. He has paid the dang’an management fee 12 years in row. In 2013, the government reduced the charge from 240 yuan a year to 120. Still, Li has paid about 3,000 yuan for keeping his file.
At present, only state-owned companies have the right to keep employees’ personal records.
Through June this year, the dang’an institutions in Beijing have managed 1.7 million files, according to the Beijing Human Resource and Social Security Bureau. The bureau says the huge income it generates goes to the city’s fiscal income fund.
“Public records management sounds like a service but it’s not. It looks like a trade, but it’s not, either. It is a captive market that ‘consumers’ have no right to say ‘no’ to,” says Professor Xiao Jun of the School of Management at Shenzhen University in Guangdong Province.
A civil servant in the Human Resources Center who insists on anonymity points out that if someone without either hukou (household registration) or dang’an, their chance of buying property, sending children to school or applying for the civil servant test will be quite remote.
If someone does not pay the public record fees, it will lead to cuts in his or her retirement pension and social insurance, according to the social servant.
On the other hand, if Yang could have waited five years, she wouldn’t have been forced to pay the 200-yuan management fee. In 2011, the Shanghai government abolished all the charges for personal files, which are entrusted to the Shanghai Education Human Resources Service Center.
And according to an August 14 report by Shanghai Youth Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Youth League of China, the Human Resource Centers of different districts in Shanghai are making a joint effort to digitize personal profiles in order to reduce the management cost.
They hope that by next year all administration charges of public records in Shanghai will be called off, including those for companies.
The personal files record an individual’s life — his or her education, scores on school transcripts, awards or punishments at school or work, each job held, among other things.
“Here in Shanghai, a file is opened for each citizen when he or she enters middle school — it is the time when you enter the Youth League,” says Peter Chen, a retired dang’an clerk in a state-owned enterprise. “There are record of family members and photos, promotions and level of work, performance evaluation — about 10 items.”
For officials and Party members, the dang’an also contains political evaluations that affect career prospects and permission to leave the country.
From 2006 to the end of 2013, Chen himself was in charge of approximately 2,000 files in the company. Behind the locked metal grill door is the 80-square-meter room stacked with iron shelves. The records are all packed in paper files with name and serial number. When Chen needs to update one’s file, he can check the computer and locate the shelf quickly.
High-ranking officials’ records have already been digitized and scanned to the computer for easier check-up. Only Chen and a handful of executives in HR can enter.
For Chen, the biggest problem in managing files is that many people were not cooperative in updating personal information.
“File management is a crucial part of human resources that relates to everyone’s life,” Chen says, adding that sometimes he had to ask several times to get the material needed for the records.
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