Fierce competition for maternity matrons
Print Edition
PREGNANT women looking for maternity matrons are facing fierce competition and can expect to pay higher salaries than they would have last year, local agencies told Shanghai Daily.
Yunjiazheng.com, a leading home-help employment website operating in China’s top-tier cities, said the average monthly pay for maternity matrons this year is 12,000 yuan (US$1,837), a 20 percent increase over 2015.
Some maternity matrons are paid up to 18,000 to 20,000 yuan per month.
Known in China as a “yue sao,” a maternity matron cares for newborn babies while living with its family, usually for a month after birth while the mother rests.
The steep rise in their average salary has been attributed to the newly introduced two-child policy and a desire to give birth to “Year of the Monkey” babies, who are thought to be blessed with cleverness.
“The demand for maternity matrons has been rising constantly, but this year it’s simply crazy because even bookings for September and October are already filled up,” said a maternity service agent surnamed Zhou who has been working in the business for 10 years. Xu Wenyi, a local high school physics teacher who is due to give birth to her second child at the end of April, said she was lucky to seal a deal with a maternity matron at the beginning of January.
“We started to look for one at the end of this year right after my baby anomaly scan and had to quickly settle on a recommendation from a neighbor,” she said.
The maternity matron, who Xu said seems reliable and possesses multiple professional certificates, will cost 12,000 yuan per month and will be at her home for three months.
“She told me that her monthly income in 2013 was 6,000 to 8,000 yuan, and she worked for our neighbor for 9,000 yuan a month last March, but she has not accepted deals under 11,000 yuan since the end of last year,” Xu said.
Xu, who spent a month after giving birth to her first child three years ago at a postpartum care center that cost 30,000 yuan, said she’ll have to stay at home this time because her first child needs constant care.
Zhou said the increasing awareness of maternity services has driven up the price over the past few years. “Few people knew about the existence of the service 10 years ago, but now even families with no extra room for the matron will hire one and ask her to sleep on the sofa,” she said.
There has been an increase in the number of new maternity matrons over the past year, but there are still not enough to meet the growing demand, say observers.
Officials estimate that an extra 40,000 to 50,000 babies will be born each year because of the two-child policy, and that the city will see around 260,000 births this year.
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