Recruiting in China

China's 99 centrally administered state-owned enterprises (SOEs) planed to recruit more than 203,000graduates this year as to ease job pressure, the state-owned assets administrator said.

The recruitment number is 7 percent more than that of the previous year.

The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) said more than 45 centrally administered SOEs would increase their headcounts this year, while 30 of them would hire the same amount of graduates compared with last year.

China National Petroleum Corp., the country's largest oil and gas producer and supplier, has by far held more than 30 job fairs in universities. It planed to recruit 13,000 graduates this year, an increase of 37 percent year on year.

China Railway Construction Corp., the nation's largest contractor, has recruited 13,000 graduates, an increase of more than 45 percent, or 4,060 people, compared with 2007.

Among all the SOEs, the Commercial Aircraft Corp. saw the largest increase. It planned to recruit 1,362 graduates, which was212 percent more than its previous plan.

The SASAC said it would strengthen supervision over the SOEs to put in place the recruitment. It also urged to further expand employment by offering more scientific research projects and probation jobs.

Dozens of employees from Baidu's (Nasdaq:BIDU) South China subsidiary stopped work and began protesting changes to their salaries in front of Guangzhou's Tianhe District Labor Bureau after negotiations with a Baidu manager failed, reports 163.com. Unnamed employees said they were made to sign a new salary agreement in late April without fully understanding it, and the subsidiary's sales department was required to sign off on new KPI metrics in March, the report said. The salary revision was carried out nationwide and accepted in Beijing and Shanghai, said a Baidu insider. Baidu did not comment on the news, the report said. Baidu Chief Operating Officer Ye Peng said the company had not experienced a strike and seemed unaware of the protest, according to the report.

The new salary system and KPI requirements, which employees described as "impossible to fulfill," became effective May 1 and may halve the salaries of most lower-level sales staff, said employees attending the protest. Management will also accept a large pay cut, they said. According to an unnamed mid-level manager, the changes will affect about 200 employees in Guangzhou and more than 1,000 in the entire South China region, including Shenzhen and Dongguan, said the report.

Ye Peng announced the dismissal of three mid-level managers in charge of sales and operation during his visit to the company's Guangzhou subsidiary on March 27.

Taiwan's April seasonally
adjusted jobless rate rose to a record 5.77 percent as
manufacturing and financial sectors were hard hit in what the
island that is suffering from what may be its longest recession,
the government said on Friday. Like most of Asia, Taiwan's unemployment rate has been
climbing steadily during the global downturn, with analysts
expecting the rise to persist in coming months as any economic
recovery will take time to filter through to the jobs market. In March, Taiwan's jobless rate hit 5.72 percent.

"Job prospects across various industries have dimmed
tremendously. Unless the global financial market situation
improves, the outlook in the job market remains bleak," said Sue
Ann Lee, an economist at Forecast Ltd in Singapore. "The uptrend in unemployment is still in sight," Lee said. Some analysts expect the jobless rate in Taiwan, a key
supplier in the global technology chain, to peak at around 6
percent in late 2009. Taiwan has a total labour force of 10.882
million out of its 23 million population. "Our jobs market is undergoing severe times now," said Huang
Jiann-jong, an official at the statistics agency, told a news
conference. "We're still seeing a lot of company closures." The state planning commission plans to keep the island's
average jobless rate at 4.5 percent this year, up from 4.14
percent last year, while President Ma Ying-jeou this week said
the unadjusted jobless rate would not rise above 6 percent. Taiwan has been hard hit by an export slump, with its economy in the first quarter shrinking by a record 10.24 percent
from a year earlier, although analysts said the worst was over.

The government on Friday said Taiwan's commercial sales in
April fell by an annual 9.5 percent, improving from a 12.2
percent decline, with analysts expecting closer trade ties with
China to help boost consumer spending. This week, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co

the world's top contract chipmaker, said it would
rehire hundreds of laid-off employees after revenue recovered,
although most companies are still keeping their workforce trim. "Overall, the labour market remains fragile and we expect
the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate will ultimately hit
the 6 percent ceiling," Christopher Wong from HSBC said.

MORE than 100 college graduates signed employment contracts with 15 funeral parlors and cemeteries yesterday, officials said.

Most of the firms will arrange training for the 108 graduates before they start work. The Shanghai Funeral and Interment Association said some jobs, such as selling grave sites, were still available.

"New graduates may not be suitable for sales work," said Wang Hongjie, director of the association. Such positions usually demand more experience as you need to deal with grieving family members.

Wang said most employees in the industry at present were middle-aged or close to retirement and younger people were needed.

Han Rui, who has just graduated from East China Normal University, has a master's degree in folklore - the highest academic qualifications among the new hires. She is to train at the Yishan Funeral Parlor in Minhang District.

"I found a sense of belonging in the industry," she said. "And I believe my major will help me a lot in the work."

The companies received 3,220 resumes at a funeral industry job fair in March. More than 400 applicants were selected for interviews, of whom 250 participated in short-term training.

The global financial crisis is predicted to create an army of three million unemployed university graduates in China this year, or about 40 percent of the 7.8 million graduates, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The overall number of jobseekers is expected to swell to 48 million, as economic growth slows to 6.5 percent or less in 2009.

The prospects are bleak for college graduates. Zhao Beiping, a student career counsellor at Wuhan University of Technology, told the Financial Times last month: “Graduates are fixated on getting jobs as civil servants, in foreign companies or big state-owned companies, and in the big cities—in short, jobs which, they have been led to believe, are best-paid and safest.”

The message was that students have to lower their expectations. With rising unemployment, many graduates will have to accept low-paid jobs. Graduates from Wuhan University of Technology, for instance, have already had to lower their starting monthly salaries from between 2,000 and 4,000 yuan (about $US300 to $600) to just 1,800. Some have to compete with rural migrant labourers for jobs.

Zhang Ming, from the China Youth University of Political Science, told the Financial Times that he went to job fairs held at two prestigious universities in Beijing in March. “But the morning was reserved for their own students, and by noon, there was almost nothing left,” he said. Zhang was thinking of looking for work in the export factories of southern China, but with exports down and job losses there, he said he might have to go to more economically backward provinces.

Graduate numbers have been rising as a result of Beijing’s policy of expanding university education over the past decade to supply cheap skilled labour for local and global corporations. In 1998, 3.4 million Chinese students attended university. By 2008, the figure had increased more than six-fold to 21.5 million.

The Wall Street Journal explained: “China is suffering from a higher-education equivalent of a global credit bubble.” Most Chinese children receive basic education so that even poor farmers can be trained to operate factory machinery. At the top of the education ladder are 75 elite universities that are well funded by the central government. In between are 2,100 less prestigious campuses where the vast majority of students are taught in what are little more than substandard degree factories.

The Wall Street Journal commented: “While experts say the country needs mid-level technical staff, many of these universities have tended to lure tuition-paying students with programs such as English, tourism, government, journalism and law. These are cheap—no large outlays for equipment are necessary—and appeal to Chinese sensibilities, which see education as a path to a government or other white collar position, and not as training for a technical job.”

The lack of technical staff has driven up wages in recent years, lowering the profitability of US corporations operating in China. According to the Wall Street Journal, Beijing should focus more centrally on providing technically trained graduates to meet the needs of global investors.

When it ordered the university expansion in 1998, Beijing paid little toward the programs that ultimately cost nearly $US100 billion, forcing campuses to accumulate large debts and charge extortionate tuition fees. The policy of “user pays” was part of Beijing’s unleashing of market forces across the board, from the dismantling of state industry to the privatisation of urban housing and healthcare.

In the economically backward province of Anhui province, its 50 universities now owe $1.2 billion to banks. Some institutions have had to use half their tuition fees just to make debt payments. Even the more developed Guangdong province had to spend $30 million last year to prevent a number of campuses from defaulting. Teachers’ wages and equipment purchases had to be cut, while class sizes have generally doubled across the country.

Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, for example, enrolled just 1,500 students until 1998 and also ran hospitals and research institutions. By government order, the university was forced to increase enrolments by a third. As the tiny campus in downtown Nanjing could not hold the new students, they were forced to stay in local hotels. Cafeterias were converted to classrooms. In 1999, the university was forced to borrow $200 million from a consortium of banks to expand further. The campus was moved to Nanjing’s Xianlin University City, which houses 11 other universities and is plagued with corruption and profiteering.

Such “university cities” have sprung up across China as part of the property boom. In 2004, government auditors found that only half of the Nanjing “university city” was used for education. The rest comprised commercial projects run by corrupt officials and real estate speculators.

Teachers at the Nanjing medicine university were angry, the Wall Street Journal reported. Ji Wenhui, a scholar of classical Chinese medical texts, complained that the library’s holdings had increased by just one half—compared to the 11-fold increase of students to 17,000. The university had 1,200 faculty and staff, only 20 percent more than when it was much smaller.

Ji told the newspaper that the school was at one point paying $60 million a year in interest, compared to total revenues of just $30 million. In 2006, the provincial government intervened to restructure the university’s loans by using one-quarter of its budget to pay off debt and cutting teachers’ salaries by a quarter.

The sharp rise in unemployed graduates has provoked fears in Chinese ruling circles of social unrest. Beijing is still haunted by the spectre of the large-scale student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, which unleashed broader protests by workers that were only crushed with the use of tanks and heavily-armed troops. The Tiananmen Square massacre paved the way for a flood of foreign investment to exploit China’s cheap labour under police-state conditions.

Chinese capitalism’s high rates of economic growth over the past 20 years have only intensified the country’s social and economic contradictions, which will inevitably produce explosive social struggles.

In the 1980s, university graduates joined the privileged state bureaucracy, while workers were employed by state industry. Today, most workers are private sector employees with little social protection, and are now suffering mass lay-offs, due to the global economic crisis. Most university graduates are not part of the emerging middle classes, but are merely skilled labourers, subject to the same capitalist exploitation.

Last month, to head off discontent, the Chinese regime ordered local authorities and state enterprises to hire more graduates. However, many of the state industries that used to guarantee jobs to graduates have been sold off or destroyed. In the civil service exam last year to join the state bureaucracy, there were only 1.3 jobs available for every 100 applicants.

Unrest is already widespread among Chinese students and graduates. Among workers and the rural poor, tens of thousands of sporadic protests are taking place against job losses, social inequality and rampant official corruption. What Beijing fears is that, as in the past, protests among students will ignite a broader class movement of the working people against the regime and the intensifying capitalist exploitation.

China's labor departments help 6.98 million workers get back 8.33 billion yuan (1.22 billion U.S. dollars) of their wages in 2008.

The figures were released Tuesday in a bulletin regarding human resources and social security in 2008 by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and the National Bureau of Statistics.

Labor departments overhauled 1.81 million employers last year and tackled 483,000 disputes, the bulletin said.

Departments focused on redressing problems regarding migrant workers' overdue wages, illegal employment and supervising enforcement of the Labor Contract Law.

The bulletin did not mention how many offenders there were or how they were punished.

Labor problems were also discovered through investigation of complaints from workers.

The bulletin also said labor departments discovered 15.62 million workers did not sign contracts with their employers in 2008, which is required by law.

In addition, about 164,000 employers did not pay around 4.9 billion yuan (718.48 million U.S. dollars) in insurance premiums.

May 19, 2009 (FinancialWire) -- Simcere Pharmaceutical Group (NYSE: SCR | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating) has appointed Peng Wang as its chief scientific officer.

Wang most recently served as VP of discovery biology at WuXi PharmaTech (NYSE: WX). Before that he was a research fellow at Schering-Plough's (NYSE: SGP) research institute, where he worked for eighteen years.

In his new role, Wang will lead Simcere's research team in developing new products and research projects. He will also participate in the strategic planning of the R&D department and manage domestic and international research collaborations.

Nanjing, China-based Simcere Pharmaceutical is a manufacturer and supplier of branded generic and original pharmaceuticals in China. Simcere manufactures and sells antibiotics, anti-cancer medication and stroke management medication.

Simcere concentrates its research and development efforts on the treatment of diseases such as cancer, strokes, orthopaedics and infectious diseases.

Norges Bank Investment Management, the world's third largest sovereign wealth fund after Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, is looking to add to its portfolio management team in Shanghai.

First set up in 1990, NBIM is an entity under the Norwegian central bank responsible for the management of three funds with total market value exceeding $300 billion. It runs the Government Pension Fund, the Government Petroleum Insurance Fund and the Norwegian Foreign Exchange Reserves. Prior to opening its Shanghai office in November 2007, the company already had a presence in London, New York and Oslo.

NBIM received approval as a qualified foreign institutional investor (QFII) from the China Securities Regulatory Commission in October 2007 and now runs a fund worth roughly $200 million in China. The Shanghai office is also responsible for maintaining the fund's Asia-Pacific portfolio, which as at end 2008, represented 16.2% of NBIM's equity investments and 5.8% of its fixed-income portfolio.

Now NBIM wants to add an investment manager to head up its global technology, media and telecom, or TMT, portfolio to be based in Shanghai. There are also openings for a new CIO, COO, chief risk officer, as well as chief treasurer in its London and Oslo headquarters.

External managers have done well out of NBIM, even against the backdrop of the financial crisis. In 2008 they were able to source $64.4 million in management fees and $75 million in performance fees from the pension portfolio of the fund. It has also contributed $52.3 million in revenue to custodian and settlement services.

But that might be set to change. Where in the past, investment managers at NBIM were given utmost flexibility to run their portfolios likened to mini hedge funds, after its unfortunate bets in financing the likes of Lehman Brothers and agency MBS securities, the market is expecting that NBIM may revert back to its passive investment style.

However, officially, the fund is still open to suggestions for long-only equity mandates between the $50 million to $250 million range. In Asia, it is interested in equities in Thailand, Greater China, South Korea and India, as well as Japanese small-caps. It says it will not invest in non-listed equities, private equity, non-listed real estate, option strategies, socially responsible investment (SRI) funds, top-down asset allocation funds, balanced portfolios or convertibles.

BEIJING, May 18 (Xinhua) -- The State Council, China's Cabinet, Monday announced that it would endeavor to create 3 million new jobs in light industry in the coming three years by boosting domestic demand.

The State Council in February unveiled initial plans to boost light industry in a bid to buoy the economy together with the 4-trillion-yuan (586 billion U.S. dollars) stimulus package presented in November and nine other specific industry stimulus plans including petrochemicals, textiles and other sectors.

The General Office of the State Council presented the detailed light industry stimulus plans Monday on its Chinese website www.gov.cn.

The government would give financing support to small and medium-sized light industry companies with good development potential in a bid to create more jobs, according to the plan.

The industrial output of the light industry stood at 2.62 trillion last year, accounting for 8.7 percent of GDP. Total exports reached 309.2 billion U.S. dollars, accounting for 21.7 percent of the national total last year.

The production volumes of more than 100 types of Chinese light industry products, including home appliances, plastics, furniture and others were the world's highest.

The industry employed around 35 million workers by the end of 2008.

Chinese light industry has felt the pinch from the global economic downturn and waning export demands.

Since Feb. 1, an estimated 900 million Chinese rural residents were eligible for a rebate of 13 percent on the prices of home appliances, in a move by the government to boost domestic sales of light industry products.

These products include color TV sets, refrigerators, freezers, mobile phones, washing machines, computers, water heaters, motorcycles, air conditioners and others.

"China will beef up efforts to bolster innovation and industrial upgrading of the light industry, aiming to foster 10 light industry conglomerates whose annual sales will exceed 15 billion yuan," according to the plan.

In addition, the government wants firms across the country to make existing facilities and production processes more environmentally friendly.

The government ordered companies to improve the light industry's products mix and reduce its pollutant discharge. Chemical oxygen demand (COD) must be cut by 10 percent or 255,000 tonnes by 2011 from the 2007 level. Waste water discharge will be reduced by 29 percent, or 1.95 billion tonnes by 2011 from the 2007 level, according to the Monday’s plan.

"China would eliminate outdated production capacity of 30 million units of low-efficient refrigerators and freezers, 600 million units of incandescent bulbs and others," the plans stated.

The government will also step up efforts on improving product quality and is scheduled to formulate 450 new industry standards by 2011 in areas including food additives, meat products, wine making, dairy products, beverages, furniture and others, according to the plan.

The draft to regulate payment of executives in China's State-owned enterprises (SOEs) is ready for review and approval from the State Council, the country's Cabinet, 21st Century Business Herald cited an unnamed source as saying.

A source from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the authorized agency to make the draft, told the paper that the regulation will set a guideline on salary structure, performance evaluation and other niches that would affect the salary package.

The salary package would consist of three parts, including the basic annual salary, payment based on performance and mid- and long-term incentives, according to the source.

The source added that once passed, the regulation would narrow the income gap between SOE executives and employees, and set the gap at a reasonable level. The Ministry of Finance, the China Banking Regulatory Commission and the China Securities Regulatory Commission would jointly carry out details of the regulation.

In terms of listed companies, the source suggested amending the corporate law to make sure minor shareholders have a say in deciding the pay of high-level executives, and accelerating the information disclosure process.

Even with non-listed companies, information on high-level executives' pay should also be made public to some extent, a move which will make it easier for stakeholders to monitor, said the source.

Supervision agencies such as auditing, finance and human resource departments are also urged to check the income distribution in SOEs, including high-level executives' pay.

An email, which China's Xinhua News Agency reports is rumored to be an internal email from Microsoft, is being spread online, stating that a new round of staff reductions at Microsoft will affect the company's employees in the Greater China region.

According to the email which is said to be signed by both Liang Nianjian, CEO of Microsoft Greater China, and Zhang Yaqin, chairman of Microsoft China Research and Development Group, the global staff reduction will affect few of employees in Greater China, but the company has not disclosed the exact number of employees to be involved.

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, reportedly sent an email to all staff of the company on May 5, announcing that that company would quickly complete its plan of reducing 5000 staff to lower employees' distress. Earlier this year, Microsoft already cut about 1400 jobs globally, and at that time, a few of the employees in China were affected.

So far, there is no direct comment from Microsoft China on the report.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (TSMC, ???), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, plans to hire up to 300 engineers after forecasting more than 80 percent growth in shipments this quarter, said recruiting agency 104 Corp (???), which is helping with the headhunt.

The recruitment drive is part of TSMC’s long-term investment in technological research and development, ensuring that it will be among the earliest companies to benefit once the economy recovers, 104 spokesman Max Fang (???) said.

“It is good timing for local employers to launch large-scale recruitment drives because the nation’s tough job market means a bigger selection,” Fang said. “We believe TSMC is just the beginning and there will be more recruitment programs by local companies later this year because hiring is usually closely linked to an economy improving, as it is now.”

An average of 10 candidates apply for each job offered by high-tech firms today, Fang said, as electronics firms hit by the recession remain cautious about hiring.

The Hsinchu-based chipmaker intends to hire between 200 and 300 design, processing technology and research engineers initially, potentially adding more positions later, Fang said.

As of the end of February, TSMC had about 22,000 employees globally, down 3.8 percent from about 22,800 at the end of last year, the company’s annual report said.

Meanwhile, competitor United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, ??) said it had no plans for significant additions to its payroll because prospects for the second half of the year were still unclear.

However, a UMC official said that the company expected strong growth in shipments in the second quarter.

UMC launched a major restructuring in the second half of last year, tweaking its organizational structure and streamlining its workforce to cut costs and improve profitability.

Separately, a survey conducted by 104 suggested an improvement in the domestic job market.

Job openings have increased 13 percent to 203,000 — the highest figure since last October — since the beginning of the year, when 180,000 jobs were on offer.

However, the number of job openings is half the number of current job seekers, meaning that the unemployment rate may not see an improvement in the short term.

The jobless rate hit a new high of 5.81 percent in March, with 670,000 adults unemployed, government figures showed.
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Ernst & Young, one of the world's biggest auditing companies, is reportedly encouraging its staff in China to leave the company.

According to an insider quoted by local media, Ernst & Young recently issued a notice, asking employees to sign an agreement with the company about their departure from the company. The insider disclosed that employees of the company's auditing, risk consulting, and tax departments across China are mostly affected and as many as 20% of the employees in these departments have been asked to leave.

However, Ernst & Young denied publicly that it is reducing staff or encouraging them to leave. The company said that it has not cut any jobs, but instead it has launched a human resources initiative to encourage staff to take a low-pay leave on voluntary basis and encourage them to take the Certified Public Accountant examination.

Questioned why the company has launched this initiative, some employees quoted in local media believe it is not because of the current financial crisis, but that the company has not done well on localization and has hired too many foreign employees in China and this has led to an increase in human resource costs.

It is understood that starting November 2008, Ernst & Young and KPMG began to think of staff reductions. Earlier, Chinese media reported that Ernst & Young had written to its employees in China asking them to consider taking a 40-day low-pay leave between July 2009 and 2010.

For Liu Kai and Yu Min, about to graduate from Harbin Institute of Technology’s Weihai campus in Shandong Province and on a job-hunting trip in Beijing, the indignities are piling up.

For one, as students from outside Beijing, they aren’t allowed into job fairs held on the campuses of some Beijing universities. At the job fairs they do attend, most jobs are either too low-level, sometimes just requiring a high-school diploma, or too advanced, geared for applicants with years of working experience.

But the main source of humiliation is the issue of pay. For applicants with no work experience, the base salary for a sales job is as little as 1,000 yuan to 1.500 yuan (around $146 to $234) a month.

“We don’t have high salary expectations as long as we can make a living on our own,” says Liu.

But can they live on 1,000 yuan a month?

To put it in perspective, a migrant worker in Beijing earns around 1,200 yuan a month, and many so-called ayis — or aunties, a term for housemaids – can make twice that. As for accommodation, sure, it’s possible to find a 12-square-meter single room beyond Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road for 350 yuan a month but a 1-bedroom apartment rarely rents for less than 1,500 yuan a month, judging from listings at real-estate portal Soufun.com.

A survey of more than 1,000 college graduates from 14 universities in Tianjin finds that 9.8% expect a first salary of below 1,000 yuan a month, while 62% see a monthly pay in the 1,001- 2,000-yuan range, while not one expects a salary beyond 5,000 yuan (in Chinese here).

At the job fairs, Yu finally lands an interview for a sales position with a monthly base pay of 1,000 yuan. A plus is that food and dormitory-style accommodation are paid for. But he still passes on the chance after a phone call from his parents. “My mom strongly rejected my idea to go for this company, as she didn’t think the 1,000 yuan salary was enough for me to survive on in Beijing,” he said.

Yu’s mother doesn’t want him to accept anything for less than 3,000 yuan a month. Judging from the job-fair billboards, that seems an increasingly unrealistic goal. “I don’t see any possibility of that for now,” Yu says.

At a job fair in Zhongguancun, nicknamed Beijing’s Sillicon Valley, a privately owned company selling cosmetics online is hiring telemarketers, at a base salary of 1,500 yuan a month. “We indeed see a lot more college graduates applying for such comparatively low-level positions this year”, said human-resources manager Liu Yansong.