More graduates choosing factory work
Print Edition
AFTER graduating in July, Yang Jitian trained as a machine operator with Ensheng, a mold manufacturing company in Dongguan, a city in south China’s Guangdong Province.
“University graduates were rare at assembly lines of plants in the past, but the situation is changing. Most of our classmates have now become blue collar workers,” Yang says.
Dongguan is a leading production base for garments and gadgets. Twenty percent of the world’s smartphones are produced there, as are 10 percent of the world’s shoes.
Since China’s opening up and reform in the late 1970s, the city has been attracting the nation’s abundant low-end labor force to work on factory assembly lines.
However, the economic slowdown and growing labor costs have forced the city to seek transformation by introducing robots and machine operators.
Yang works in a workshop twice the size of a basketball court, at a constant temperature of 24 degrees Celsius.
The machines he operates are worth more than 1.5 million yuan (US$223,000) on average. All Yang needs to do is type complicated codes correctly and monitor the running status of the machine.
This year, Ensheng recruited seven college graduates from an international cooperation class at Dongguan Technician College, including Yang.
General manager Wu Bin says the limited competence of farmers who became workers had greatly affected the company’s development in fine manufacturing and processing.
“A worker broke a cutting head worth 400,000 yuan on the first day he joined the company,” Wu says, adding that he plans to recruit more college graduates next year.
The minimum wage has jumped from 690 yuan in 2006 to 1,510 yuan in 2015, with labor costs doubled or even tripled in some companies.
In September 2014, pressured by a persistent labor crunch and surging wage bills, Dongguan started its push toward automation, providing subsidies for manufacturing “machine for man” programs.
By January, nearly 2,700 projects under the program had received government funding, introducing 76,000 machines. The machines have increased productivity 2.5-fold, freeing 200,000 line workers.
In college, Yang learned skills ranging from making standardized records to machine operations.
“It seems a nice way out, to be a trained blue collar worker, since the manufacturing industry in Dongguan is in transition,” he says.
To attract university students who prefer office jobs, the central government is offering subsidies for student tuition and funds for vocational colleges.
By 2016, China had nearly 1,400 vocational colleges, aimed at educating high-end technical personnel.
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