Financial Times: China’s migrant workers face bleak outlook

China’s army of the rural unemployed has begun its long march back to coastal manufacturing centres. A year ago many of the annual migrants rapidly found work. But this year, in a sign of the impact of the global economic downturn, they are facing a bleaker scenario.

Employers in Shigu, an industrial area in the southern city of Dongguan, had to work hard this time last year to attract workers. Factories set up recruiting stations advertising the cleanliness of their dormitories and quality of their canteens. Milling workers, many of whom had jobs elsewhere but were on the lookout for an upgrade, queued up for tours of each factory’s facilities.

On Friday, however, Shigu was quiet. While many factories have posted job openings on their gates, last year’s beggars are this year’s choosers – and vice versa.

“It should be easier for us to recruit people this year,” said Chen Dan, an executive at the Huajian Group, a large shoemaker with a factory in the area.

“We will mainly recruit female workers,” he added, citing a preference common among Chinese manufacturers. “Before, we couldn’t find enough and had to take men.”

Next door to Huajian’s facility, a plastics factory advertised jobs for women between the ages of 18 and 40. That ruled out Zhu Zhaohuan on two counts. “Nobody wants to hire us, we’re over 40,” said Mr Zhu, who lost his job on a Dongguan construction site late last year. His wife, a factory worker, was also fired. The couple, from a poor rural area in nearby Huizhou, are struggling to support their two school-age children.

For China’s estimated 130m migrant workers, this inauspicious start to the Year of the Ox is only likely to get worse.

The return flow of workers from interior provinces, where they spend the festive season with their extended families, traditionally begins in earnest only after the Spring Lantern Festival on the 15th day of the lunar new year, which is Monday, February 9.

Last week Chen Xiwen, director of the government’s Central Rural Work Leading Group Office, cited an agriculture ministry estimate that 20m migrants had lost their jobs and returned home for the holiday. The figure, based on a survey of 150 villages and extrapolated across the country, was twice that calculated by the human resources ministry at the end of last year.

In raising the alarm that 20m unemployed migrants might soon be on the march – joined by perhaps 7m new entrants to the itinerant workforce – Mr Chen was putting on alert the Chinese bureaucracy, every level of which has been focused on making the migrants’ job hunt as “harmonious” as possible.

“We have demanded that companies and factories should avoid job cuts as best they can,” said Zhao Jiande, an official with the Shanghai labour bureau’s Migrant Workers Office. “Companies have taken measures to keep as many positions as possible – either through prolonging the holidays or shortening work shifts.”

Zhang Yuexing, a masseuse who has settled in Shanghai with her husband, personifies the government’s potential nightmare. Her five siblings, who recently lost their carpentry and manufacturing jobs, are stranded back on the family farm in inland Anhui province. “I’m the only one who returned after Chinese new year,” she said.

It is unlikely, however, that the Zhang family’s predicament represents a systemic threat to the Chinese Communist party’s grip on power, even if there are another 20m recently unemployed migrants loitering in villages across the country.

While that is a large number of potentially disaffected people, equivalent to the entire population of Australia, from the Chinese government’s perspective it is a huge relief that they are not all in one place.

Localised disturbances are a common occurrence and these are only likely to multiply in the months ahead. But Chinese workers focus their anger first on the factories and bosses that fire them, with local government officials quick to adopt an empathetic and supportive pose when disputes flare up.

Equally important, the Chinese state’s ability to sniff out and suppress the stirring of a more ambitious labour movement remains formidable.

“I don’t really see a huge threat to social or political stability,” says Han Dongfang, director of the China Labour Bulletin in Hong Kong.

“First they are not together; second they are not organised; and third they are [busy] looking for jobs.”

Additional reporting by Yan Jin in Shanghai and Jamil Anderlini in Beijing