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Labor shortages in coastal east acute as workers go west
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China’s coastal cities are facing the pressure of a severe labor shortage as the country’s western interior catches up as a magnet for skilled workers.
The situation came to the fore following publication of a survey last week showing a shortfall of 123,300 workers in Guangzhou, capital of south China’s Guangdong Province.
Eighty percent of the surveyed companies expressed concern about production recovery after the Spring Festival holiday.
Chinese migrant workers traditionally return to their hometowns to mark the lunar New Year and look for new jobs following the holiday.
This year, the shortage has been particularly pronounced, according to the Guangzhou Human Resource Market Service Center, the government-led employment agency that conducted the survey.
To quench the thirst for labor, company owners along the east coast are rushing to the west to hire, fueling a tug-of-war amid intensified competition for skilled workers.
Industry insiders attribute the lack of workers in China’s coastal east to many factors, including high living expenses, rising labor costs, and a shrinking income gap.
Delayed return
The end of the Spring Festival holiday usually marks the beginning of a new workload in coastal cities, but the postponed return of migrant workers is delaying the plans of company owners desperate to resume production.
In Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang Province, recruitment ads can be found on the front doors of restaurants near the busiest roads, a common tactic to ease the typical post-holiday labor shortage.
Zhang Jinxin, owner of a chain restaurant on crowded Wulin Road, said that his catering staff is now thin as more than half of the chefs and waiters he hired haven’t returned after the week-long holiday, which ran from January 31 to February 6. Similar situations can be found in Guangdong, where manufacturers are moving heaven and earth to hire new workers to get their factories rolling.
But the hiring process has yielded unsatisfactory results because skilled workers are “not that easy to find,” said He Mu’an, head of the Dongneng Mechanical and Electrical Engineering Co Ltd, located in Dongguan City of Guangdong.
“This is an annual travail for us,” He said.
Zhang Weiguo, director of the Institute of Economics with the Shandong Academy of Social Sciences, sees the shortage of labor along the coast as a sign of a disconnect between improving employee benefits and workers’ demands for even higher pay.
“Small and medium-sized companies have generally increased pay, but that is dwarfed by soaring commodity prices,” Zhang said.
As high living costs in the east have smashed the dreams of many workers, rising labor demands in less-developed and less-expensive western regions seem to be a better choice.
Go west
The huge inflow of foreign capital and the emergence of industries such as electronic devices have fueled an insatiable demand for migrant workers in the west.
In Chongqing, major districts such as Yongchuan, Hechuan and Fuling need at least 15,000 laborers each year, driven by a campaign by local government to boost the local economy, according to official statistics.
According to the city’s labor department, laborers in Chongqing who chose to work in the area of the city outnumbered those working outside the municipality for the first time in 2011, and in early 2013, the difference exceeded 1 million.
In the central province of Henan, an area with a large number of outbound laborers, a staggering 3.86 million more people chose to work in the province rather than making ends meet in other places in 2013, official data showed.
The shrinking income gap between the east and west is an advantage that has wooed migrant workers westward, according to investigations by labor departments and employment agencies in various localities.
The income gap in electronics companies, for instance, has shrunk to 400 yuan (US$66) at present from 1,400 yuan in 2008.
Many migrant workers move home to take care of family members, or because they want to start a career on their own with the money they have earned in big cities.
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