Archive for ‘employment’

« Older Entries  |   Newer Entries »
09/03/2013

* Work-Life Balance a Challenge for Indian Women

WSJ: “Yes, the number of women opting for MBAs in India is increasing. And yes, India Inc. is consistently working to hire more women, who are young, ambitious and increasingly qualified.

But can these women strike a good work-life balance?

Even though India Inc. has been encouraging a greater number of women in the workplace, that number is still low. A new study by Grant Thornton, a global accounting and advisory firm, shows that on average, women make up only 15% of the workforce in Indian companies. Globally, this figure stood at 35%. Today, only 1.8% of CEOs in India are women.

How to enhance the role of women in India Inc. was a question addressed by many of the businesswomen who gathered in New Delhi’s Habitat Center on Women’s Day, Friday.

Sunita Cherian, vice president of human resources at Wipro, speaking on the sidelines of the event, said that her company tries to meet the changing priorities of their women employees depending on their stages of life.

For instance, the company is more flexible on working hours for women after they get married, says Ms. Cherian. Wipro Ltd. is also determined to persuade women to stay in their job, even if they may be tempted to quit and rely on their partners’ incomes instead.

“This is the stage where a woman might feel that a dual-income is not a necessity,” she says.

Ms. Cherian, who has spent 17 years working at Wipro Ltd., believes that her “ambition was fuelled” by the fact that she stepped into the right organization and the right family after marriage.

Srimati Shivashankar, who is in charge of promoting greater gender diversity at HCL Technologies, says she had to work harder than others as she was climbing the corporate ladder. Cracking stereotypes like “think director, think male” was not easy, says Ms. Shivashankar.

Striking a good work-life balance is much more important for women than for men. A new global research by Accenture, a consulting firm, found that around 70% of female respondents in India said that work-life balance was key to their definition of “success” in their career, while only 40% of men felt that.

The study also found that the difficulty of balancing life and work is a key reason why women in India leave their jobs. While 24% of Indian men surveyed said they quit their jobs because of long or inflexible working hours, for women that figure was 48%.

via Work-Life Balance a Challenge for Indian Women – India Real Time – WSJ.

Related articles

Posted in Economics, employment, Gender imbalance, Gender issues, higher education, India alert, Politics, Technology, Women's rights | 3 Comments »

Tags: , , , , , , ,
09/03/2013

* Where Have China’s Workers Gone?

Bloomberg: “Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang are taking over China’s leadership at a time when growth has slackened and labor issues have become more complex.

China's Disappearing Surplus Labor

Reports that businesses such as Foxconn Technology Group are raising wages and struggling to recruit workers in China have intensified debate over just how many surplus workers the country still has. Meanwhile, a boom in college-educated Chinese has raised concerns of an impending threat to U.S. competitiveness. These seemingly disparate concerns about China’s labor force are actually linked by common underlying factors, with critical implications for China’s ability to remain the growth engine of the world.

China’s large pool of surplus labor has fueled its rapid industrial growth. Now this “demographic dividend” may be almost exhausted, and its economy reaching a Lewis turning point: a shift named after the Nobel prize-winning Arthur Lewis, who was the first to describe how poor economies can develop by transferring surplus labor from agriculture to the more productive industrial sector until the point when surplus labor disappears, wages begin to rise and growth slows.

Citing periodic labor shortages and unskilled wages that have risen since 2003, prominent Chinese economists suggest that time has come. The International Monetary Fund disagrees and puts the turning point much later — between 2020 and 2025, based on a model analyzing labor productivity. A third view is that China’s surplus labor is still plentiful, given that about 40 percent of the labor force is still underutilized in the rural sector, mostly in agriculture, which accounts for only 10 percent of gross domestic product.

Mobility Restrictions

In China, many market imperfections impede the mobility and use of labor. Thus, actual availability may fall far short of what is potentially available. The hukou residency system that restricts migrant workers from accessing services where they are employed is the most glaring example of this kind of imperfection. Less obvious is the extent to which China’s rural- support policies, including subsidy programs, may be encouraging workers to stay in agriculture longer than they should.

Surplus workers may not be in agriculture as in the original Lewis model but in smaller towns, underemployed at depressed wages. The result is that China has the highest rural- urban income disparity in the world.

Why don’t these workers move to more productive jobs in more dynamic settings? In formal terms, it is because their “reservation wage” has increased — that is, the minimum wage they demand to move is much greater than their current wage, because for a generation that didn’t experience the hardships of the Mao Zedong era, the monetary and emotional costs of relocation have risen. Many workers won’t move to major cities that lack affordable housing. They may also have rights to land that can’t be sold for full market value — thus, staying in familiar surroundings is now a more attractive proposition.

If recent decades saw a huge migration that “brought workers to where the jobs are” along the coast, the future may mean the reverse, involving “bringing the jobs to where the workers are” with profound implications for China’s economic geography.

In lesser known provinces such as Henan, with a country- sized population of 100 million, large numbers of young workers seek factory positions but are unwilling to relocate to seemingly foreign places in coastal China. As China becomes more consumption-oriented with rising incomes and urbanization, the center of economic gravity will naturally move inland where two- thirds of the population resides.

College Graduates

Just as young workers are demanding more satisfying jobs, they also increasingly feel entitled to a college education. Government policy has expanded access to higher education. From 2000 to 2010, the percentage of college-age cohorts enrolled in universities more than tripled in China, a rate of increase far above that of India, Malaysia and Indonesia. China wants to produce 200 million college graduates by 2030; they will make up more than 20 percent of the projected labor force, more than double the current ratio. The push to expand higher education means the number of college-educated has leapfrogged — and excessively so — ahead of those holding only vocational or junior college degrees.

These college-educated workers are unwilling to settle for factory work and compete for office-based positions. College graduates are four times as likely to be unemployed as urban residents of the same age with only basic education, even as factories go begging for semi-skilled workers. Given the underdeveloped service sector and still-large roles of manufacturing and construction, China has created a serious mismatch between skills of the labor force and available jobs.

As the economy moves up the value chain, substituting more capital-intensive manufacturing for unskilled labor-intensive assembly, a shortage of semi-skilled workers is appearing. But the excessive growth of college graduates has outpaced the structural transition and prematurely shifted the labor supply from semi-skilled manufacturing workers to more knowledge- intensive service professionals. More emphasis on vocational training and industry-specific engineering skills will help China fill its immediate need for manufacturing workers.”

Yukon Huang and Clare Lynch are, respectively, a senior associate and a junior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment. The opinions expressed are their own.

via Where Have China’s Workers Gone? – Bloomberg.

Related articles

Posted in China alert, Economics, employment, higher education, labour reform, labour shortage, Migrant workers, Uncategorized, wage rises | 2 Comments »

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
25/02/2013

As China matures and its labour policies and pay improves, it will become less competitive for low-cost production. The question is: can China move up the manufacturing value chain fast enough to avoid the predictable problems it will face?

See also:

Related articles

Posted in China alert, Economics, labour shortage, Manufacturing, Migrant workers | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , ,
18/02/2013

* Outsourcers turn to China to plug India’s skills gap

The Times: “India is running out of the skilled engineers needed to man its giant software industry, forcing companies to hire staff overseas, especially from China, one of the industry’s pioneers has warned.

An Indian employee at a call centre provides service support to international customers

Kris Gopalakrishnan, the co-founder and executive chairman of Infosys, said that the outsourcing sector was facing a manpower shortage. India, he said, was not producing enough properly trained engineering graduates to meet expanding global demand for its services.

The country may have a population of more than 1.2 billion people, but the dearth of trained graduates is driving up salaries in its IT industry by 15 per cent a year. That, in turn, is eroding the sub-continent’s global competitiveness and forcing companies such as Infosys, Tata Consulting Services and Wipro to invest in finding foreign workers.

“A lot of the tertiary education in India is done by private colleges and there are significant quality issues there,” Mr Gopalakrishnan said.

India produces about 700,000 engineering graduates every year, but of these only about 25 per cent are sufficiently well trained to be considered for a job in IT, Mr Gopalakrishnan said.

Infosys — whose customers include BP, GlaxoSmithKline and Tesco — was planning to treble its workforce in China from 3,500 to more than 10,000 to help cope with constraints at home, where most of its 155,000 staff work.

“Apart from China, there are not many countries in the world where we can recruit large enough numbers,” Mr Gopalakrishnan added. Infosys, which generated revenues of $7 billion last year, already operates large software development and outsourcing operations in Shanghai, Dalian, Beijing, Hangzhou and Jiaxing. The wages in China are higher than in India but are rising at a more modest pace of about 10 per cent annually.

Infosys has also been expanding its overseas presence in other low-cost countries, such as the Philippines, and has explored opportunities in Egypt.

In expanding fields such as data analytics, there are only about 50,000 engineers in India with the right programming skills. Demand is at least five times that number, according to Heidrick & Struggles, a recruitment company.

India’s software and outsourcing industry employs about three million people directly, an increase of 188,000 from a year ago. It generated $75.8 billion in exports in 2012-13, making it India’s largest single export industry, and is continuing to grow at more than 10 per cent a year even as India’s overall rate of economic growth has nearly halved over the past three years, to just over 5 per cent.

Mr Gopalakrishnan said that as well as hiring overseas, Infosys was trying to improve the quality of education in India by funding teacher training programmes at 350 engineering colleges. The group has also built a private campus in the southern city of Mysore capable of training 14,000 students.

“We will have to continue to invest heavily in education and training,” he said.”

via Outsourcers turn to China to plug India’s skills gap | The Times.

See also: https://chindia-alert.org/economic-factors/information-technology/

Related articles

Posted in China alert, Chindia Alert, Digital communications, economic inter-dependence, Economics, higher education, India alert, IT, labour shortage, Outsourcing | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
10/02/2013

* As Graduates Rise in China, Office Jobs Fail to Keep Up

NY Times: “This city of 15 million on the Pearl River is the hub of a manufacturing region where factories make everything from T-shirts and shoes to auto parts, tablet computers and solar panels. Many factories are desperate for workers, despite offering double-digit annual pay increases and improved benefits.

Mr. Wang near his rented apartment in the Tianhe district of Guangzhou. He is thinking of quitting his job as a security guard to look for work that would allow him to use his degree.

Wang Zengsong is desperate for a steady job. He has been unemployed for most of the three years since he graduated from a community college here after growing up on a rice farm. Mr. Wang, 25, has worked only several months at a time in low-paying jobs, once as a shopping mall guard, another time as a restaurant waiter and most recently as an office building security guard.

But he will not consider applying for a full-time factory job because Mr. Wang, as a college graduate, thinks that is beneath him. Instead, he searches every day for an office job, which would initially pay as little as a third of factory wages.

“I have never and will never consider a factory job — what’s the point of sitting there hour after hour, doing repetitive work?” he asked.

Millions of recent college graduates in China like Mr. Wang are asking the same question. A result is an anomaly: Jobs go begging in factories while many educated young workers are unemployed or underemployed. A national survey of urban residents, released this winter by a Chinese university, showed that among people in their early 20s, those with a college degree were four times as likely to be unemployed as those with only an elementary school education.

It is a problem that Chinese officials are acutely aware of.

“There is a structural mismatch — on the one hand, the factories cannot find skilled labor, and, on the other hand, the universities produce students who do not want the jobs available,” said Ye Zhihong, a deputy secretary general of China’s Education Ministry.

China’s swift expansion in education over the last decade, including a quadrupling of the number of college graduates each year, has created millions of engineers and scientists. The best can have their pick of jobs at Chinese companies that are aiming to become even more competitive globally.

But China is also churning out millions of graduates with few marketable skills, coupled with a conviction that they are entitled to office jobs with respectable salaries.

Part of the problem seems to be a proliferation of fairly narrow majors — Mr. Wang has a three-year associate degree in the design of offices and trade show booths. At the same time, business and economics majors are rapidly gaining favor on Chinese campuses at the expense of majors like engineering, contributing to the glut of graduates with little interest in soiling their hands on factory floors.

“This also has to do with the banking sector — they offer high-paying jobs, so their parents want their children to go in this direction,” Ms. Ye said.

via As Graduates Rise in China, Office Jobs Fail to Keep Up – NYTimes.com.

Related articles

Posted in China alert, Economics, employment, higher education, labour shortage | 4 Comments »

Tags: , ,
20/01/2013

* China’s workforce peak demographics

Well reasoned analysis that goes behind and beyond headline figures – as expected from the EIU.

EIU: “China’s working age population is set to peak in 2013, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit‘s latest demographic projections. However the impact of this milestone on the country’s economy will be different from the experience of other, predominantly rich countries that have already undergone the process. While ageing, the country’s urban workforce will continue to grow. It will also become much better educated.

China Ageing Population

In the developed world, ageing is most commonly associated with shrinking workforces relative to the rest of the population, giving rise to pension cuts, postponed retirement and higher taxes on the young. As an economy still in transition, China need not fret about such issues. For a start, China’s state pension system is far from generous and its coverage low. Rather, the country’s biggest fear is that of worsening labour shortages—a phenomenon that was first reported in the mid–2000s and was subsequently the subject of much attention in the national media. There are two good reasons why these fears are overblown.

Rural fuel

First, China is still in the midst of a massive urbanisation drive. When the working-age populations of Germany and Japan, the world’s largest ageing economies, began to shrink in 1999 and 1995 respectively, the process of massive rural-to-urban migration had already matured. The proportion of the population residing in urban areas, or the urbanisation rate, had more or less stabilised at 73% and 65% respectively.

In contrast, China’s urbanisation rate will only reach 55% this year and is likely to continue rising by around one percentage point (or 13m people) every year, according to our projections. China will only reach Japan’s level of urbanisation by 2022 and Germany’s by 2030. Thus, even though China’s working-age population will shrink overall, the urban working-age population will only peak in 2029 after reaching 695m—135m higher than it was in 2012.

The flip side of this trend is a shrinking rural population. However, China’s rural population has been diminishing for three decades without much adverse impact on agricultural output. That is because its countryside is overpopulated: there are too many farmers working too little land. Indeed, China has even managed to boost agricultural output over the years by investing in machinery and technology.

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly how many more workers the agricultural sector can afford to lose before a large impact on farm output is felt. However, most economists agree that another 100m or so is achievable. Coupled with the fact that the primary sector only accounts for 10% of GDP, it becomes clear that, when it comes to maintaining economic growth, the urban workforce is really the only one that matters.

From factories to classrooms

Second, China’s labour shortages have largely been misdiagnosed. Much ink has been spilt attributing the lack of young workers for unfilled factory vacancies to demographic factors. Yet the number of Chinese aged 16–24 increased from 196m to 210m between 2000 and 2010. The rise in urban areas is even greater. Where, then, did all the young workers go? The answer is simple: they went to school.

The proportion of junior secondary school graduates continuing on to senior secondary school surged from 51% to 88% between 2000 and 2010. At the same time, the proportion of Chinese aged 16–19 that were either employed or seeking employment (the labour participation rate) fell from 57% to 34%. The relationship is clear: rising enrolment rates at schools have played a major role in postponing entry to the workforce.

The surge in school enrolment implies that the supply of young workers entering the job market will not only remain stable as China passes its demographic turning point, but might even grow. Enrolment rates cannot rise forever, and all the would–be teenage workers that were absorbed by the schooling system over the past decade will enter the workforce sooner or later.

As China’s youth becomes better educated, the coming decade will witness the emergence of a two-tiered workforce. One tier will consist of graduates looking for office jobs. The other will remain the country’s “traditional” source of labour: relatively low–skilled rural migrants seeking work in factories and construction yards. The latter group will, however, have aged substantially, creating new challenges for managers and HR departments across the country.

China’s workforce challenge is thus twofold: policymakers need to ensure that there are enough white-collar jobs for graduates, while employers of low-skilled workers will need to come to grips with hiring and managing an older workforce. Failure to do so will have serious consequences. An educated class disillusioned by high unemployment is something China can ill afford at a time of rising social tensions. At the same time, an inability to replace young workers with older ones could spell the end of the golden age of China’s mighty manufacturing sector.

Yet, if the demographic transition is managed successfully, there will be just cause to celebrate. The Chinese economic miracle has pulled more than 200m people out of poverty over the past 30 years. In the last ten, it has allowed 60m children who would otherwise never have finished secondary school to do so. The next task will be to ensure that their studies have not been in vain.”

via Peak demographics.

Related articles

Posted in Ageing population, agriculture, China alert, Construction, demographics, Economics, employment, higher education, Labour, labour shortage, Manufacturing, Population, urban development | 3 Comments »

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
17/01/2013

* China Loses Edge As Worlds Factory Floor

WSJ: “China is losing its competitive edge as a low-cost manufacturing base, new data suggest, with makers of everything from handbags to shirts to basic electronic components relocating to cheaper locales like Southeast Asia.

imageThe shift—illustrated in weakened foreign investment in China—has pluses and minuses for an economy key to global growth. Beijing wants to shift to higher-value production and to see incomes rise. But a de-emphasis on manufacturing puts pressure on leaders to make sure jobs are created in other sectors to keep the worlds No. 2 economy humming.

Total foreign direct investment flowing into China fell 3.7% in 2012 to $111.72 billion, the Ministry of Commerce said Wednesday, the first annual decline since the fallout from the global financial crisis in 2009.

Then, a 13% fall in foreign investment into China reflected dire conditions for business in the U.S. and Europe, and global risk aversion, which choked off capital flows. Economists say the drop in 2012 is partly cyclical, driven by slowing overall growth in China and Europe’s prolonged debt crisis.

But it also is the result of a long-term trend of rising wages and other costs that have made China less attractive, especially for basic manufacturing, economists say.

By contrast, foreign direct investment into Thailand grew by about 63% in 2012, and Indonesia investment was up 27% in the first nine months of last year.

Coronet SpA, an Italian maker of synthetic leather with production in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, plans a new factory in Vietnam to take advantage of lower labor costs and to be closer to its customers in the shoe and handbag businesses, many of which have already moved there.

via China Loses Edge As Worlds Factory Floor – WSJ.com.

See also: https://chindia-alert.org/2012/12/07/apple-to-return-some-mac-production-to-u-s-in-2013/

Posted in China alert, Economics, employment, exports, FDI, Salaries, wage rises | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , , , ,
07/01/2013

* Use of student interns highlights China labor shortage

Reuters: “In September, the largest factory in the northeastern Chinese coastal city of Yantai called on the local government with a problem – a shortage of 19,000 workers as the deadline on a big order approached.

Chinese college students majoring in textile work at a garment factory in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, October 19, 2012. More and more factories in China move inland from higher-cost coastal manufacturing centers, labor is turning out to be neither as cheap nor abundant as many companies believed. As a result, many multinationals and their suppliers are corralling millions of teenage vocational students to work long hours doing assembly line jobs that might otherwise go unfilled - jobs that the students have no choice but to accept. Picture taken October 19, 2012. REUTERS/Stringer

Yantai officials came to the rescue, ordering vocational high schools to send students to the plant run by Foxconn Technology Group, a Taiwanese maker of smartphones, computers and gaming equipment.

As firms like Foxconn shift factories away from higher-cost centers in the Pearl River Delta in southern Guangdong province, they are discovering that workers in new locations across China are not as abundant as they had expected.

That has prompted multinationals and their suppliers to use millions of teenage students from vocational and technical schools on assembly lines. The schools teach a variety of trades and include mandatory work experience, which in practice means students must accept work assignments to graduate.

In any given year, at least 8 million vocational students man China’s assembly lines and workshops, according to Ministry of Education estimates – or one in eight Chinese aged 16 to 18. In 2010, the ministry ordered vocational schools to fill any shortages in the workforce. The minimum legal working age is 16.

Foxconn, the trading name of Hon Hai Precision Industry, employs 1.2 million workers across China. Nearly 3 percent are student interns.

The company “has a huge appetite for workers”, Wang Weihui, vice director of the Yantai Fushan Polytechnic School, told Reuters during a recent visit to the city.

“It tightens the labor market,” said Wang, whose school sends its students to work at Foxconn and other firms.

Local governments eager to please new investors lean on schools to meet any worker shortfall. That’s what Yantai, in Shandong province, did in September when Foxconn had trouble filling Christmas orders for Nintendo Co Ltd Wii game consoles.

“It has been easier to recruit workers in the Pearl River Delta than some inland locations,” Foxconn told Reuters in written comments in late December.

Some companies cite rising wages in southern China for the shift elsewhere. Wages are a growing component of manufacturing costs in China, making up to 30 percent of the total depending on the industry, according to the Boston Consulting Group.

Wages began to rise around 2006 as the migration of rural workers to Guangdong ebbed. China’s one-child policy, plus a jump in higher education enrollment, further depleted the number of new entrants to the workforce, forcing up wages.”

via Use of student interns highlights China labor shortage | Reuters.

Related articles

Posted in China alert, Economics, employment, Labour, labour shortage, Manufacturing, temporary workers | 1 Comment »

Tags: , , , , , ,
30/12/2012

* Xinhua unveils top 10 domestic events of 2012

Xinhua News Agency on Saturday unveiled its list of the year’s 10 most attention-grabbing events in China.

“The events are as follows, in chronological order:

01 China cuts 2012 GDP growth target

At its annual session in March, the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament, adopted the government work report, in whichgrowth - Ind vs Ch the country lowered its GDP growth target to 7.5 percent this year after keeping it at around 8 percent for seven consecutive years. The change was made in the face of global turbulence and pressing domestic demand for economic restructuring.

02 Medical reform meets three-year target

The State Council in March issued an implementation plan for reforms in the health and medical care sector in the next three years. According to official statistics, as of the end of 2011 the basic medicare insurance system covered over 1.3 billion people in China, more than 95 percent of the total population, marking the realization of the previous three-year target for the 2009-2011 period to form a universal medicare system.

 

03 Bo Xilai under investigation; Wang Lijun convicted

The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on April 10 decided to suspend Bo Xilai’s membership in the CPC Bo & GuCentral Committee Political Bureau and the CPC Central Committee, as he was suspected of being involved in serious discipline violations in the cases of Wang Lijun and Bogu Kailai. The CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection put him under investigation. Bo was later expelled from the CPC and public office and the case was turned over to prosecutors for investigation.

In August, Bogu Kailai was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve for intentional homicide by the Hefei City Intermediate People’s Court in Anhui Province.

In September, Wang Lijun was sentenced to 15 years in prison for bending the law to selfish ends, defection, abuse of power and bribe-taking by the Chengdu City Intermediate People’s Court.

04 China vigorously protects maritime rights

SoChinaSeaIn response to some foreign countries’ actions infringing upon China’s maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea and East China Sea, China has vigorously launched campaigns to protect its legitimate rights.

Since April, China has dispatched government ships and planes to monitor Huangyan Island in the South China Sea.

Five months later, the Chinese government announced the base points and baselines of the territorial waters of the Diaoyu Islands and their affiliated islets and started continuous patrols in waters around the Diaoyu Islands.

In December, China reiterated its claims in the East China Sea by presenting to the UN Secretariat its Partial Submission Concerning the Outer Limits of the Continental Shelf beyond 200 Nautical Miles in the East China Sea.

05 China’s first female astronaut participates in successful manned space docking mission

In June, China sent three astronauts, including the country’s first female astronaut, Liu Yang, into space for the nation’s manned Liu Yang, China's first female astronaut, waves during a departure ceremony at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, Gansu province, June 16space docking mission.

The three astronauts successfully completed an automatic and a manual docking between the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft and the orbiting Tiangong-1 lab module in space before making a safe return to Earth.

06 Manned submersible sets new national dive record

Chinese submersible breaks 7,000m mark Also in June, China’s manned submersible, the Jiaolong, set a new national dive record after reaching 7,062 meters below sea level during its fifth dive in the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean.

 

 

07 First aircraft carrier commissioned

In September, China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, was delivered to the People’s Liberation Army Navy and put into commission after years of refitting and sea trials. Last month, the country successfully conducted flight landing exercises on the aircraft carrier, where the home-grown J-15 fighter jet made its debut in a landing and take-off exercise.

08 New CPC leadership and new targets

Xi & LiThe CPC convened its 18th National Congress between Nov. 8 and 14, when the Party’s new leadership was elected, including Xi Jinping, who was elected general secretary of the CPC Central Committee. The congress also set new targets for the country such as efforts to complete the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects.

09 Full coverage of pension scheme

The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security announced in November that China’s urban and rural pension insurance systems covered 459 million people at the end of October and that as many as 125 million elderly people receive monthly pensions. The State Council had previously decided to make pension insurance available for everyone in urban and rural areas.

10 New CPC leadership rejects extravagance, bureaucracy

The newly-elected leadership of China’s ruling party has pledged to reject extravagance and reduce bureaucratic visits and meetings, in a bid to win the people’s trust and support.

In a meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee on Dec. 4, members vowed to shorten meetings and documents, reject bureaucratism in domestic and overseas visits, reduce road closures for official activities and support more practical content in news reports. The leaders also promised to take the lead in putting these requirements into practice.”

via Xinhua unveils top 10 domestic events of 2012 – Xinhua | English.news.cn.

Posted in compensation, employment, Good news, Politics | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
30/12/2012

* China tightens loophole on hiring temporary workers

Further labour reform is being implemented. This set will make China more progressive than many western countries!

Reuters: “China amended its labor law on Friday to ensure that workers hired through contracting agents are offered the same conditions as full employees, a move meant to tighten a loophole used by many employers to maintain flexible staffing.

A worker welds steel bars at a construction site for a new train station in Ningbo, Zhejiang province, December 6, 2012. REUTERS/China Daily

Contracting agencies have taken off since China implemented the Labor Contract Law in 2008, which stipulates employers must pay workers’ health insurance and social security benefits and makes firing very difficult.

“Hiring via labor contracting agents should be arranged only for temporary, supplementary and backup jobs,” the amendment reads, according to the Xinhua news agency. It takes effect on July 1, 2013.

Contracted laborers now make up about a third of the workforce at many Chinese and multinational factories, and in some cases account for well over half.

Some foreign representative offices, all news bureaus and most embassies are required to hire Chinese staff through employment agencies, rather than directly.

Under the amendment, “temporary” refers to durations of under six months, while supplementary workers would replace staff who are on maternity or vacation leave, Kan He, vice chairman of the legislative affairs commission of the National People’s Congress standing committee, said at a press conference to introduce the legislation.

The main point is that contracting through agencies should not become the main channel for employment, he said, acknowledging that the definition of backup might differ by industry.

“In order to prevent abuse, the regulations control the total numbers and the proportion of workers that can be contracted through agencies and companies cannot expand either number or proportion at whim,” Kan said.

“The majority of workers at a company should be under regular labor contracts.”

Although in theory contracted or dispatch workers are paid the same, with benefits supplied by the agencies who are legally their direct employers, in practice many contracted workers, especially in manufacturing industries and state-owned enterprises, do not enjoy benefits and are paid less.

Employment agencies have been set up by local governments and even by companies themselves to keep an arms-length relationship with workers. Workers who are underpaid, fired or suffer injury often find it very difficult to pursue compensation through agencies.

China would increase inspections for violations, Kan said, including the practice of chopping a longer contract into several contracts of shorter duration to maintain the appearance of “temporary” work.”

via China tightens loophole on hiring temporary workers | Reuters.

Posted in China alert, Economics, employment, Labour, labour reform, temporary workers | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , , , ,
« Older Entries  |   Newer Entries »
CCChang

Law of Unintended Consequences

continuously updated blog about China & India

ChiaHou's Book Reviews

continuously updated blog about China & India

What's wrong with the world; and its economy

continuously updated blog about China & India