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Plight of 225 million migrant workers requires urgent action
By John Gong |
February 25, 2010, Thursday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
I am an e-commerce junkie.
When I was in the US, I used to knock off a lot of goodies from eBay's auctions.
Now in China, I even knock off socks at Taobao, the Chinese equivalence of amazon.com. It is convenient, it is cheap and it saves a lot of time.
But for those die-hard Taobao junkies like me who tried to order a few last-minute gifts for the Spring Festival, it was a mess.
The entire Taobao site seemed to have shut down. Why? Because the fast delivery business is coming to a standing still as thousands and thousands of employees who are mostly migrant workers were going home for the holiday season.
I even tried to order some ties from a local vendor on Taobao. Sorry, no one could deliver. That was the time for us city slickers to appreciate how much of our life is reliant upon those migrant workers from the countryside.
For cities like Beijing and Shanghai, it seems that two parallel economies are chugging along at the same time. On the one side, there is what I call the "office tower economy" filled with well-dressed well-healed white-collar folks staying in glitzy downtown CBDs.
And there is the "back-alley economy" on the side, filling our little petty needs for laundry, haircuts, dining, and other things.
The workhorse of the "back-alley economy" consists of mostly migrant workers struggling to make a living in big cities. Their pay is meager. Their work is hard.
The total number of migrant workers is staggering. The latest official statistics that I can find from the Ministry of Labor and Social Security is for 2008 - a total of 225 million migrant workers.
That is to say, one out of every six people in China is struggling somewhere in a city to make ends meet. Sixty-four percent of them are men.
That is a huge population associated with huge problems that we can't simply sweep under the rug.
Many of these people are unmarried and thus do not have regular family life. Their sexual issues have implications for social stability and harmony. For those who do have families, many of them are separated from their children who stay in hometowns with grandparents.
Among those children who stay with parents, many have education difficulties. Many migrant workers don't have adequate medical coverage. Housing, retirement and all these issues pose great challenges to China's urbanization process.
The fundamental approach to addressing the migrant worker issue is to recognize that China's urbanization process is a long-term phenomenon and today's migrant workers are tomorrow's city citizens.
No prejudice
And the infusion of rural labor to the city needs to be protected without prejudicial measures that disadvantage incumbent city dwellers.
The UK's urbanization process took 100 years from 1776 to 1871. It took South Korea and Brazil 40 years to reach 80 percent urban population percentage.
So for China, my opinion is that it is going to be another 20 to 30 years before we will reach equilibrium between the urban and the rural population.
And in that process, the government should level the playing field for migrant workers in the job market, in terms of eliminating institutional barriers in health care, insurance, and other social safety net aspects.
Also the government can help migrant workers develop human capital by providing professional training, as Japan once did in rural area when its economy started to take off in the 1960s.
China certainly doesn't want to have its own version of the "Grapes of Wrath" during its urbanization process.
(The author is associate professor of economics at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. He can be reached at: johngong@gmail.com)
When I was in the US, I used to knock off a lot of goodies from eBay's auctions.
Now in China, I even knock off socks at Taobao, the Chinese equivalence of amazon.com. It is convenient, it is cheap and it saves a lot of time.
But for those die-hard Taobao junkies like me who tried to order a few last-minute gifts for the Spring Festival, it was a mess.
The entire Taobao site seemed to have shut down. Why? Because the fast delivery business is coming to a standing still as thousands and thousands of employees who are mostly migrant workers were going home for the holiday season.
I even tried to order some ties from a local vendor on Taobao. Sorry, no one could deliver. That was the time for us city slickers to appreciate how much of our life is reliant upon those migrant workers from the countryside.
For cities like Beijing and Shanghai, it seems that two parallel economies are chugging along at the same time. On the one side, there is what I call the "office tower economy" filled with well-dressed well-healed white-collar folks staying in glitzy downtown CBDs.
And there is the "back-alley economy" on the side, filling our little petty needs for laundry, haircuts, dining, and other things.
The workhorse of the "back-alley economy" consists of mostly migrant workers struggling to make a living in big cities. Their pay is meager. Their work is hard.
The total number of migrant workers is staggering. The latest official statistics that I can find from the Ministry of Labor and Social Security is for 2008 - a total of 225 million migrant workers.
That is to say, one out of every six people in China is struggling somewhere in a city to make ends meet. Sixty-four percent of them are men.
That is a huge population associated with huge problems that we can't simply sweep under the rug.
Many of these people are unmarried and thus do not have regular family life. Their sexual issues have implications for social stability and harmony. For those who do have families, many of them are separated from their children who stay in hometowns with grandparents.
Among those children who stay with parents, many have education difficulties. Many migrant workers don't have adequate medical coverage. Housing, retirement and all these issues pose great challenges to China's urbanization process.
The fundamental approach to addressing the migrant worker issue is to recognize that China's urbanization process is a long-term phenomenon and today's migrant workers are tomorrow's city citizens.
No prejudice
And the infusion of rural labor to the city needs to be protected without prejudicial measures that disadvantage incumbent city dwellers.
The UK's urbanization process took 100 years from 1776 to 1871. It took South Korea and Brazil 40 years to reach 80 percent urban population percentage.
So for China, my opinion is that it is going to be another 20 to 30 years before we will reach equilibrium between the urban and the rural population.
And in that process, the government should level the playing field for migrant workers in the job market, in terms of eliminating institutional barriers in health care, insurance, and other social safety net aspects.
Also the government can help migrant workers develop human capital by providing professional training, as Japan once did in rural area when its economy started to take off in the 1960s.
China certainly doesn't want to have its own version of the "Grapes of Wrath" during its urbanization process.
(The author is associate professor of economics at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. He can be reached at: johngong@gmail.com)
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