Category: "Living & Working in China"
China recruits college graduates for social jobs
June 9th, 2009China has launched its first social worker recruiting event for college graduates. Beijing is offering 2000 social worker posts for fresh college graduates this year.
Over 16,000 students are taking the qualification exam on Saturday. Around one third of the candidates have PhD and Masters degrees. The students will be competing for various positions, including jobs in community resident committees and community health care stations. It's expected that the city will expand the program within the next 2 years.
China sees job growth
June 5th, 2009China announced Wednesday there was a recovery in its job market in the first four months of this year with 3.65 million urban residents finding new jobs.
Noting the improvement, announced by the Chinese Cabinet, Yang Weiguo at Renmin University of China told the China Daily the short-term measures instituted to counter the employment pressures have been adequate. He said China now must create jobs that meet the needs of development.
The measures taken by the government to boost employment include expanding domestic consumption, reducing enterprises' tax burden, encouraging graduates and migrant workers to be self-employed and setting up vocational training.
Xinhua reported China's urban jobless rate stood at 4.2 percent at the end of 2008 with 8.86 million on the unemployment rolls.
The government plans to allocate $6.13 billion this year for creating jobs, up 66.7 percent from last year, the State Council said while warning the country still faced a tough employment problem because of labor oversupply and economic structural issues.
The employment situation remains especially grave for college graduates, whose numbers are expected to swell to more than 6 million this year, even as 1 million graduates from last year are still trying to find jobs.
China's employment situation improving
June 4th, 2009China's employment situation is improving. That's the message to come out of the State Council's meeting on Wednesday. But the top administrative body also acknowledged that the situation is still severe as the country's economic recovery is not yet secure. It also produced new measures to safeguard jobs.
Premier Wen Jiabao chaired the State Council's regular meeting, which focused on employment. The central government said new jobs so far this year exceeded 3.6 million by the end of April and migrant workers are returning to factories. It added the country's job situation has made a turnaround from the slide seen in the forth quarter of last year.
But the State Council admitted it's not yet clear what the full effects of the global financial crisis will be for China and that uncertainties remain in its recovery. It cited fewer new jobs and a higher jobless rate compared with 2008. The State Council also said a 42 billion yuan special employment fund in the central budget should be put in place as scheduled. That's 67 percent more money than was allocated last year.
Regarding the creation of new jobs, the government pledged to bolster private economies, which always provide the largest pool of employment. It also said that various industrial development plans should focus on job creation.
College graduates, migrant workers and low-income families will get more help. And the government will offer training programs for all kinds of people, from migrant workers to graduates. The government called for improved job center services and will now offer subsidies to interns serving in central and western China.
Since the second half of 2008, China has implemented various measures to boost employment. And now, the State Council said it would redouble efforts to help people ride out the economic downturn.
Recruitment fair for overseas graduates
June 3rd, 2009A job fair targeting overseas graduates was held recently in Beijing. It attracted more than one thousand graduates who had returned to China, diploma in hand.
45 companies and institutions attended the fair, bringing nearly 600 job opportunities with them. Some potential employers included the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shougang Group, and China Agricultural University. On the other side, graduates of overseas universities have adjusted their requirements, such as location and salary.
She said most of her fellow students had lowered their expectations on salary. But many employers say they are not interested in the educational background of job seekers. What they care for is the actual ability to work.
Overseas Graduate, said, "The advantage of overseas graduates is mainly in their language skills. But as foreign-funded firms are in depression, there is less room for us to make use of our advantage."
After staying overseas for a long time, these students are not familiar with the domestic working environment. This is a major concern for employers who attended the fair. Some overseas graduates say they hope there will be more chances for them to have face-to-face talks with domestic firms, because that will help them get the experience they need.
Graduates struggle as China slows
June 2nd, 2009At a recent job fair in Beijing, thousands of soon-to-graduate Chinese university students dashed from employer to employer handing over their resumes.
Just a few hours after the two-day fair opened, one company had received 50 job applications for just five positions.
Final-year Chinese students, like others across the world, are currently looking for their first job as they prepare to graduate.
But in China this is the first time in many years that the outlook has been so bleak - and this year there will be 6.1 million new graduates.
The vast China International Exhibition Centre in Beijing has several aircraft-hanger-sized halls, and last week it hosted a job fair geared towards graduates.
Fewer jobs
Companies with stalls at the fair said there were just not as many jobs available this year compared to previous years.
One of those with fewer vacancies was Best Talent, a recruitment firm that finds senior and middle managers for international companies.
"There are a lot of candidates at the moment, but even those with a good education are finding it difficult to find jobs," said the company's Vicky Liu as she accepted a curriculum vitae from yet another job hopeful.
A few months ago, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimated that about 12% of last year's graduates had still not found jobs.
That figure was three times higher than the official urban unemployment rate.
Last week's fair attracted students from across China, including 24-year-old Zhang Hai, who is about to graduate from a university in far-off Nanjing.
"Because of the financial crisis the outlook is not that good," said Mr Zhang, who is spending two months in China's capital looking for work.
"There are not that many jobs, but lots of students looking for work so obviously there's a lot of competition," he added.
Mr Zhang, who has been studying computer science, has been given money by his family to rent a flat in Beijing while he looks for work.
"I'm just about to graduate, I'm getting older and I'm still using the family's money so of course there's some pressure on me to find a job," he said.
Who to blame?
Despite the tough competition, students do not seem to be blaming the government for the current difficult job situation.
"It's a pity, but I can't complain too much. I just have to continue looking for something suitable," said Wang Jiumei, who also attended last week's Beijing job fair.
The 25-year-old student, who studies English in the nearby city of Tianjin, intends to go abroad to continue her studies if she cannot get a job.
Chinese government officials will be pleased to hear that students are not blaming them for their poor employment prospects.
They had been worried that high graduate unemployment could lead to discontent which, in turn, could cause social unrest.
The Tiananmen protests, which took place 20 years ago in May 1989, showed the government that dissatisfied students are capable of taking their demands onto the streets.
"For the last 20 years the government has been concerned about keeping the university population happy," said Arthur Kroeber, managing director at Beijing-based economic research firm Dragonomics.
He said the current employment problems facing graduates was not just because of fewer jobs, but also because there are now more graduates.
But Mr Kroeber believes the problem will sort itself out over time as university students lower their expectations.
"Certain kinds of clerical jobs that used to require only a high school education will increasingly be taken up by people who have a university education," he said.
Help from the government
But the Chinese government is not just sitting idly by and hoping that will happen. Officials are trying everything they can think of to help graduates find a job this summer.
In the city of Weifang, in Shandong Province, officials in one government department have been told they each have to find jobs for three graduates.
In a country where personal networks are important, Weifang officials have been asked to use all their contacts and influence.
Beijing city government has just announced a scheme to employ 1,600 graduates on three-year contracts as assistants to officials in the villages around the city.
This will not only help develop rural areas, but also find jobs for students who might otherwise be out of work.
The salary for these positions is relatively low - 2,000 yuan ($293, £183) a month for the first year - but the city government is promising other perks to encourage potential applicants.
After their contracts finish, village assistants could be given a Beijing resident's permit, which is vital for all those that want to continue working in the capital.
There are those who believe the Chinese economy is in good shape - despite the global recession - and will soon bounce back, creating more jobs for graduates.
Oliver Huang, whose company Mediaco helps foreign firms check how their brands are doing in China, is optimistic.
"Markets in Europe and the US are now mature, but China is still an emerging country, where the demand is still huge," he said at the Beijing job fair.
But with economic growth slowing and unemployment rising, the government is taking no chances.
Officials ordered to pull strings for graduates
June 1st, 2009An order for officials to pull strings to ensure jobs for graduates has sparked heated debate in an east coast city.
The personnel bureau in Weifang, Shandong province, ordered every official in the bureau to use their influence and connections to help at least three university graduates this year, Qilu Evening News reported.
Netizens doubted whether graduates from poor families, among the 60,000 graduates hunting for jobs in Weifang this year, would get priority for assistance.
Zhang Zhengzhi, the deputy director of Weifang's personnel bureau, said the May 14 order is not compulsory and would give priority to poor students.
"Do the math - 60 officials can only help 180 graduates in our city," he said.
"We only want to set an example to promote employment rather than take care of all job hunters."
In the face of a gloomy employment crisis, a Chinese human resources expert yesterday warned that local governments should make more efforts to facilitate the transfer of information between graduates and enterprises.
"The rule may put pressure on officials, who might play tricks with some companies to provide temporary offers to graduates to enhance the employment rate," said Wu Yongping, deputy director of public policy and management institution under Tsinghua University. "An official's duty should focus on organizing more employment fairs for students, and providing students' information to companies."
China centrally administered SOEs to recruit more graduates
May 31st, 2009China'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.
Baidu Staff Strikes Over Salary Cuts
May 27th, 2009Dozens 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 April jobless rate at record, to rise further
May 26th, 2009Taiwan'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.
Graduates sign up for jobs in funeral industry
May 25th, 2009MORE 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.
Unemployed graduates in China to reach 3 million in 2009
May 22nd, 2009The 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 mln workers get back wages in 2008
May 21st, 2009China'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.
Norges Bank hiring in Shanghai
May 20th, 2009Norges 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.
China to create 3 mln jobs in light industry
May 19th, 2009BEIJING, 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.
Ernst & Young Cuts Staff In China
May 6th, 2009Ernst & 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.
China’s Graduates: How Much a Month Did You Say?
May 4th, 2009For 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.
China jobless rate rises
April 30th, 2009BEIJING (China) - CHINA'S registered urban jobless rate, the only official measure of unemployment in China, rose to 4.3 per cent at the end of the first quarter of 2009 from 4.2 per cent three months earlier, local media reported on Wednesday.
It marked the highest registered urban jobless rate since June 2006, though the figure is based on a narrow population segment and probably understates the real unemployment level by a wide margin.
Officials, concerned about the prospect of rising unrest, have warned that China faces a severe test this year in providing enough new jobs, especially for the country's millions of migrant workers and new graduates.
The registered urban jobless figures exclude migrant workers and farmers. Economists say the real jobless rate is probably at least twice as high.
Yin Weimin, minister of human resources and social security, was quoted by a financial website, caihuanet.com, as saying that the end-March jobless rate hit 4.3 percent.
Can China Handle Massive Unemployment?
April 29th, 2009It's an understatement to say that the job market is getting tight in China. That's the inevitable conclusion from today's WSJ cover story "China Faces Grad Glut After Boom At Colleges." This corroborates a March article in China Daily that put on a positive spin on the situation with this headline: "More Teaching Jobs for Graduates." The gist there is that the government will pay for schools to hire more teachers to soak up some of the graduate pool (gotta love Chinese media for looking on the bright side of things). China blogger Michael Pettis commented on this trend last month with some optimism about what this could mean for China's future when he wrote:
"If more Chinese graduates are forced – by terrible job prospects – to consider starting their own businesses, the long term consequences for China should be positive although, as everyone running a small business in China will tell you unendingly, starting and running businesses here is extremely difficult and, what is worse, it is never easy to know when you are and when you aren’t legally compliant. Still, China really does need more entrepreneurialism and one of the unexpected benefits of the crisis may be to boost small businesses."
The simple fact is that China will benefit over the long-term if college grads actually leverage their education to create value and be entrepreneurial rather than just use it to get hired to work in the bullpen fielding calls for Ctrip.com (CTRP) -- see above photo. Though in the short-term, there could be some real pain.
So what
Now, if you're a regular reader of this blog, then you know our Global Gains mindset. We're immediately asking "Who benefits?" and "Who gets hurt?" by this big picture trend.
The losers, I think, are pretty obvious. They include companies such as 51Job (JOBS), which does job placement in China. Now, they'd be in a good place if they got paid by job seekers to help them find openings. Instead, 51Job gets paid by corporations who are looking to do recruititing...and there's not a whole lot of recruiting going on right now.
Other losers are companies that cater to urban working professionals. These, after all, are what college graduates become, and there are fewer of them this year than there were in previous years. A company like Ctrip, which helps Internet-savvy Chinese book travel, looks like a clear example despite the fact that it's well-run and a leader in the travel space in China. Its addressable market will just be smaller in the near-term, and the company may achieve lower growth rates as a consequence.
Winner winner chicken dinner
On the flip side, there are going to be companies that do benefit, and I think the obvious ones there are firms that help young Chinese people become more competitive job applicants. This quote from Jane Yang in the WSJ is illustrative: "There are no job prospects for someone like me," she said during a quick meal at the school's cafeteria. "I think I'll just go to grad school."
McDonald's To Recruit 10,000 Employees In China In 2009
April 28th, 2009Despite the economic slowdown fast food giant McDonald's has announced that based on its good performance in China, the company plans to recruit 10,000 new employees in the country, of which, 80% will be college graduates.
Kenneth Chan, the newly appointed CEO of McDonald's China, told local media that talent is very important for the company's continuous development in the Chinese market and recruitment is related to McDonald's business expansion and the promotion of its 24-hour services.
Chan said China is one of the fastest growing markets for McDonald's and the company's comprehensive service models, including breakfast, 24-hour services, and dessert stations, in this market play important roles in adding income to the revenue of the restaurants. But it also means they need more employees to do this work. In fact, McDonald's already started to select quality talents in 2008 and entered several famous Chinese universities, including Peking University, to attract their graduates.
In addition to the recruitment plan, McDonald's launched a China leadership development plan for the first time to provide professional training to its talent management team and outlet expansion team to make preparation for its further expansion.
China labour disputes rise as economy slows
April 24th, 2009BEIJING (AFP) — The number of labour disputes in China have soared amid the global financial crisis as laid-off employees seek salaries owed to them by suddenly defunct companies, state press reported on Wednesday.
A total of 98,568 cases involving labour disputes were filed in Chinese courts in the first three months of 2009, up 59 percent year on year, the China Daily said, citing figures from the nation's supreme court.
"Amid the global financial crisis, the number of businesses going into the red or going bankrupt continues to grow, leading to more disputes over salary claims," Du Wanhua, a top official with the court, was quoted as saying.
Du said the rise was also likely due to the introduction last year of a labour contract law that provided a more solid legal footing for complaints and increased workers' awareness of their rights.
The newspaper said the increase followed a 93 percent surge in such cases in 2008 to 286,221.
Chinese officials have repeatedly warned of the potential for widespread unrest if unemployment continues to grow.
The World Bank last month forecast China's economy would grow 6.5 percent in 2009.
That would be its slowest expansion in nearly two decades and well below the eight percent level that Chinese leaders say is needed to keep enough people in work and to avoid unrest.
The economy, which grew nine percent in 2008, has slowed sharply amid the collapse of overseas markets for China-made goods due to the world economic downturn.
Thousands of factories and other businesses have failed in recent months, throwing millions out of work and leading to protests in some areas as angry workers demanded back pay owed by failed companies.
Novartis in hiring mood - in China
April 20th, 2009Big Pharma continues its march into emerging markets. Chinese newspapers are full of a Novartis expansion push into their country, which is expected to boost employment and lead to--gasp!--a recruitment push for sales reps. And Pfizer said today it would mount a tender offer for Pfizer India stock, seeking to buy another one-third stake in the publicly traded company.
Novartis is ploughing money into its Chinese operations, including R&D and sales and marketing. Joe Jiminez, CEO of Novartis Pharma, wouldn't say exactly how much the company is investing there, only saying that it's "a considerable amount," according to China Daily. The company plans to launch six new products in the country while boosting its clinical research, too.
China recently announced a healthcare reform initiative that would emphasize treatment for chronic disease; that's something Novartis could capitalize upon, too. The newspaper says Novartis intends to "further strengthen its cooperation with the Chinese government and hospitals" in light of that reform package. The upshot? More jobs. Novartis added about 500 to its Chinese workforce in 2008, and it aims to recruit even more this year, the majority of them in sales.
Next, Pfizer: The company now owns some 41 percent of its Indian subsidiary, with the rest publicly traded. The drugmaker wants to boost that stake to 75 percent, in a tender that could be worth about $136 million. The offer is expected to open in June, managed by HSBC Securities in India; it comes in at about an 8.6 percent premium over last week's closing price.
Wal-Mart rejigs jobs in China
April 17th, 2009Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, yesterday launched a job optimization and regrouping program to reduce labor costs in China.
Under the program, the company plans to relocate some of the mid-management staff at its stores to similar posts in the new stores that are being opened in China.
The company intends to start this by shifting five to six mid-management posts from each of its present stores, said Leally Huang, public relations manager, Wal-Mart China.
Wal-Mart had 144 stores across China by the end of 2008, and plans to open 23 new stores by the end of the first-quarter this year.
"Those who are unsatisfied with the program and want to leave would be given adequate compensation, but we will try and see if we can retain them," said Huang.
The company's decision come close on the heels of a report in National Business Daily that Wal-Mart was implementing a lay-off program in China, its largest since entry in 1996.
Around 10,000 staff including 2,500-odd mid-management personnel and many others at different lower levels from Wal-Mart's 144 stores were reportedly demoted or asked to leave with compensation.
Huang, however, has denied the report. "The program is not about job cuts. It is a corporate interior personnel reshuffle that has been necessitated due to the decline in our corporate business," she said.
Hurt by the economic slowdown especially in the US, Wal-Mart's global sales revenue dropped by 0.1 percent in the last five weeks of 2008, which according to the company, is far below its expectations.
The company, however, said markets like China, Brazil and Mexico are still showing robust growth.
Company executives maintained that they are still scouting for new opportunities outside of the US, especially in Asia-Pacific, with China figuring as one of the most prominent locations for growth.
Huang said Wal-Mart's China business grew in 2008, but refused to disclose details. "Wal-Mart's China expansion plan has not been deterred," she said.
In 2008, Wal-Mart opened 19 stores, compared to 30 in 2007.
It is reported that Wal-Mart's regrouping program has not gone down well with employees from the Guangdong and Hunan provinces turning to the local trade unions for protection.
"They are just special cases, and Wal-Mart will sort them out," Huang said.
Wu Ruiling, deputy secretary-general of China Chain Store & Franchise Association, said supermarkets are one of the few areas in the retailing sector that has not been negatively affected by the financial crisis.
France-based Carrefour said it will not cut jobs in China, while Wu-Mart, another leading player with 700 stores nationwide, said it plans to recruit around 3,000 to 4,000 this year.
Best Buy: No Plan to Slash Jobs in China
April 16th, 2009Best Buy China has not gotten a job cut scheme from the headquarters yet, said Ms. Qian, noting that the New York-listed company will continue its expansion in the country in spite of the global economic downturn. By far, the electrical appliances retailer has opened more than 100 stores in China, one of its most critical markets abroad.
Earlier this February, Best Buy unveiled its plan to eliminate as many as 250 jobs at corporate headquarters in the US, part of its efforts to pare costs amid the lingering financial crisis. In addition, the company and its UK partner have decided to put off the opening of their first outlet till 2010, months later than planned.
McDonald's to step up hiring in China this year
April 15th, 2009Fast food chain McDonald's will recruit more than 10,000 people, hike salaries of existing staff and set up training and development programs for employees this year, its country head told China Daily yesterday.
Kenneth Chan, the newly appointed chief executive officer of McDonald's China, said the chain will open more outlets this year to keep pace with rising business growth.
The company will also incorporate more performance-oriented metrics and raise employee salaries nationwide by at least 6.3 percent, Chan said.
This is Chan's first public announcement of the company's strategy for the year after his appointment last month following the exit of Jeffrey Schwartz, the former China chief who bid farewell to McDonald's after working with the chain for 40 years.
Chan's appointment comes at a time when the financial crisis has spared very few countries, including China. And, sustaining the growth momentum of McDonald's under Schwartz will be a key challenge for Chan when Chinese consumers are actually tightening their belts.
"Actually, I am not concerned about China, as I am confident about the long-term potential of the market," Chan said. "This year will mark the beginning of the company's most rapid expansion in China."
Last year, McDonald's said it planned to add 175 new outlets in 2009 to the current 1,000 it has in China, the biggest addition ever. In the interview, Chan refused to disclose new outlet numbers for the year.
In 2008, the head count at McDonald's China outlets grew by 8.9 percent, double that of the United States and the European Union, making China its fastest growing market worldwide.
Susanna Li, vice-president of human resources at McDonald's China, said besides recruiting more people, it will also invest in training and developing Chinese talent.
"McDonald's is not only a company that sells hamburgers, but also a talent-oriented enterprise. McDonald's has been trying to create training opportunities for different levels of staff," she said.
KFC is the largest fast food chain in China, with more than 2,300 stores in 450 cities. Company executives told China Daily last December that KFC would open more restaurants in 2009 than "the previous year's average of 400" new food joints.
Sources said KFC's annual recruitment figure for the year will also exceed 10,000 people.
McDonald's set up its Hamburger University in Hong Kong in 2000, also its seventh worldwide, to train its Chinese staff. The company plans to open another on the Chinese mainland next year.
The company also launched the China Development Leadership Program this year, which aims to develop skills that will help employees find the best location for new outlets.
Salary gap in China widening
April 14th, 2009Salaries grew slower and pay disparities between various industries rose last year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said yesterday.
Salary increases for urban employees were down 1.5 percentage points in 2008, with average salary before tax at 29,229 yuan (4,280 U.S. dollars). The survey did not cover private enterprises or individual businesses.
The salary growth is relatively high given the backdrop of a global economic slowdown," said Su Hainan, director of the wage committee of the China Association of Labor Studies.
"But as people earn more, they more than ever need an improved social security system so that they can spend more to expand domestic consumption."
Su forecast pay increases of 13 percent this year while a report by the Hong Kong based HR Business Solutions predicted salary rises of around 11 percent on the mainland.
The NBS report also showed that the gap between eastern and western/central regions is narrowing, which Su described as a "good sign".
This is partly because export-oriented enterprises in the eastern and coastal regions were the hardest hit in the financial crisis, leading to millions of layoffs.
The report also found the salary divide between the highest and lowest paid industries has widened, with the former 10 times more than the latter.
Salaries in the securities sector were 172,123 yuan, 5.9 times the average level. Employees in timber processing and wood and bamboo products were the lowest paid, with a salary of 15,663 yuan.
China publishes national human rights action plan
April 13th, 2009The Chinese government published its first working plan on human rights protection Monday, pledging to further protect and improve the country's human rights conditions in an all-round way.
The National Human Rights Action Plan of China (2009-2010), issued by the Information Office of the State Council, or Cabinet, highlighted various human rights that would be promoted and protected in less than two years, from people's right to work, to the rights of detainees and the disabled.
Death penalty will be "strictly controlled and prudently applied," "impartial and fair trials" of litigants will be guaranteed, and the people will enjoy more rights to be informed and to be heard, the government promised.
More job opportunities will be created, per capita income will be increased, social security network will be broadened, and health care and education will become more accessible and affordable in order to guarantee the people's economic, social and cultural rights.
The document also detailed how the government will do to "guarantee human rights in the reconstruction of areas hit by the devastating earthquake in Wenchuan, Sichuan Province" on May 12, 2008, in which about 87,000 people were confirmed dead or missing, more than 370,000 were injured, and at least 15 million people were displaced.
"The realization of human rights in the broadest sense has been a long-cherished ideal of mankind and also a long-pursued goal of the Chinese government and people," said the document.
But the government admitted that "China has a long road ahead in its efforts to improve its human rights situation," though unremitting efforts have been made to promote and safeguard human rights since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, which "fundamentally" changed the fate of the Chinese people.
The government said the plan was framed in response to the United Nations' proposal, on the basis of past experience, "in the light of practicality and China's reality," and by following the essentials of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
China In-Focus: China Agritech To Cut Executive Pay
April 8th, 2009China Agritech, Inc. said it is implementing a salary program for its senior management team which will reduce the cash compensation of their base salary levels for the 2009 year as part of a new cost control plan.
In a statement, the company said it will consider a performance-based option plan, "to further incentivize the management team to focus on producing greater business and financial results."
As a part of the cost control measures, China Agritech is also reducing the standard of senior management's travel expenses, in particular of business class travel and lodging.
Beijing-based China Agritech is engaged in the development, manufacturing and distribution of liquid and granular organic compound fertilizers and related products in China.
The company sells its products to farmers located in 26 provinces of China.
Momentive to cut 80 jobs in Willoughby, taking work to Newark, Ohio, and to China
April 7th, 2009Momentive Performance Materials Inc. said it intends to cut 80 hourly and salaried workers at its 130-employee Willoughby quartz tubing, fiber-optics and lamp materials plant.
The Albany, N.Y., based company, a spin-off from General Electric Co., will determine the timing of the layoffs during a 60-day consultation with the IUE-CWA, an electrical union allied with the Communications Workers of America Local 707, which represents hourly workers in Willoughby.
Momentive plans to consolidate work at its plant in Newark, east of Columbus. Work force reductions at that plant have thinned employment by almost 100 since fall, including 23 layoffs last week.
The job cuts, including those in Willoughby, are part of a broad set of cost-saving measures in response to a slowdown in Momentive's business. The company hopes to lower expenses by $40 million.
Specifically, the manufacturer is cutting quartz-related jobs in Willoughby and in Geesthacht, Germany, and moving part of the work at those two plants to its facilities in Newark and in Wuxi, China. The company also said it would temporarily reduce salaries for its top executives by 10 percent and for most professional and administrative employees by 7.5 percent, and require some workers to take an unpaid week off.
Those laid off at Willoughby, some of them members of IUE CWA, may be eligible for severance pay and other benefits, a written statement said. "Qualified employees would also be eligible for tuition reimbursement and retraining benefits for a period of up to 12 months" and, possibly, preferential consideration for employment at other Momentive locations, according to the statement.
The Willoughby plant will remain open and continue to process materials that are used in quartz-product manufacture. Momentive said it did not expect to hire additional employees at the Newark site and will hire only a small number in China.
As of the beginning of April, Momentive had about 4,600 employees globally. It said the salary cuts and furloughs would affect about 2,300 employees and probably would continue through 2009.
The company manufactures silicone materials, sealants and adhesives, special heat-dissipating ceramics and quartz tubing. The products are used in lamps and in the semi-conductor industry as well as in a range of consumer, industrial and medical products.
Momentive grew out of the sale of GE Advanced Materials to equity firm Apollo Management L.P. in 2006. It has become a global leader in the development and manufacture of specialty materials. Momentive's revenue in 2008 was $2.6 billion.
In addition to the Willoughby and Newark plants, it also has Ohio facilities in Strongsville and Richmond Heights, according to spokesman John Scharf.
Hong Kong's jobless rate at near 3-year high
April 3rd, 2009HONG Kong's unemployment rate rose to a 32-month high because of staff cuts by firms reducing costs to weather the city's deepening recession.
The seasonally-adjusted jobless rate for the three months through February climbed to 5 percent, the government said yesterday on its Website, from 4.6 percent at the end of January. That was more than the 4.9-percent median estimate of 13 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.
Walt Disney Co, the second-largest United States media firm, said yesterday that it was shedding staff in the city. The government has pledged to create about 120,000 jobs by quickening infrastructure spending, subsidizing employers for new hires and setting up temporary government positions.
"Although the government has pledged a massive job creation program, the timing and the scale of the scheme is uncertain and much will depend upon the response of the private sector," said Joanne Yim, chief economist at Hang Seng Bank Ltd in Hong Kong. "With more employers likely to shed jobs in the coming months, the unemployment rate may climb to as high as 7 percent this year.'
More Taiwanese lose jobs as rate hits 5.75%
March 31st, 2009TAIWAN'S jobless rate hit a record 5.75 percent in February despite a multibillion dollar plan to create jobs and cushion the economic downturn, regulators said yesterday.
Of the total 624,000 unemployed workers, 53 percent lost their jobs due to company closures or layoffs.
Taiwan's electronics sector - the heart of its export-dependent economy - has been hit especially hard as demand has dropped sharply from the United States and other industrialized countries.
Labor Council Chairwoman Wang Ju-shiuan put part of the blame for the rising unemployment rate ?? up from 5.31 percent in January - on a failure to implement public works projects as scheduled.
Taiwan unveiled a NT$320-billion (US$9.5 billion) plan in early February to help create some 150,000 jobs in 2009.
Taiwan's economy shrank 8.36 percent in the final quarter last year, following a minus 1-percent drop in the third quarter.
Fewer employers aiming to hire staff
March 30th, 2009JUST over a third of employers in China, or 34 percent, plan to increase staff numbers in the first quarter, 10 percent fewer than last quarter.
However, the figure remains the highest in Asia, according to a report released yesterday, and many respondents remain optimistic about their company's performance in 2009, with 47 percent saying it would be "excellent" or "good."
The Hudson Report surveyed the expectations of almost 3,000 key executives from multinational organization in all major industry sectors in Asia, with 858 of them based in China.
The steepest decline in hiring expectation was in the banking and financial services sector, from 50 percent last quarter to 29 percent this quarter.
The media, pubic relations and advertising sector also reported falling hiring expectations, from 33 percent last quarter to 18 percent.
Last year some 61 percent of respondents had expected to increase hiring in the first quarter.
The percentage who forecast a head count reduction rose from 1 percent in 2008 to 8 percent this quarter.
The consumer sector was the most optimistic about the future, with 62 percent forecasting excellent or good performance in 2009, while respondents in information technology and telecom were the least confident, with 15 percent believing their company's prospects would be poor this year.
Despite the decline in hiring expectations, almost half of the respondents were willing to pay salary increases of more than 10 percent to attract new people at management level, of which 17 percent of respondents expected pay increases of more than 20 percent, a significantly higher figure than for any other market in Asia, including Japan and Singapore.
Across all sectors, bonuses of more than 10 percent of the employees' yearly salary were forecast by 32 percent of respondents, of which 6 percent said they would pay bonuses of more than 20 percent. Some 12 percent of respondents were not planning to pay a bonus, 6 percent more than in 2008's first quarter.
Angie Eagan, Hudson's Shanghai general manager, said that employers could now pay lower salary increases to attract new managerial hires and were actively recruiting talented candidates displaced by the downturn.
1.24m college students to graduate jobless this year
March 27th, 2009About 1.24 million Chinese college students will graduate without jobs that require their qualifications this year, Tian Chengping, head of the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, has warned.
A total of 4.13 million students graduated from higher education institutions this year, 750,000 more than last year, said Tian.
Tian said the government had set up a mechanism to provide guidance and training for unemployed graduates.
Only 22 percent of China's new jobs last year were for college graduates, according to a ministry study of 114 urban labor markets.
Tian said the country should create more jobs in the process of economic development and urged college graduates to work in grassroots units and undeveloped areas where they were most wanted.
With an average 10 percent annual economic growth over the past two decades, China was no longer able to accommodate surplus labor, with the official unemployment rate standing at 4.1 percent in the first nine months.
The demand for college graduates was down by 22 percent in 24 provinces and 15 major cities from last year, said a report issued by the Ministry of Personnel in March.
A survey showed 52.14 percent of bachelors considered lack of social experience as the biggest obstacle in finding work.
Colleges and universities should organize internships to prepare students for employment, said Lin Zeyan, a researcher with the Development Research Center of the State Council, at a forum this month.
The country needed to develop the service sector and promote small and medium sized enterprises to create more jobs, said Mo Rong, deputy chief of the Labor Science Research Institute of the ministry.
Students flog CVs in flagging market
March 26th, 2009In an unfortunate reversal of fortune, more than 70 percent of upcoming graduates have yet to secure a job.
"Normally about 70 percent of graduates have job offers in March, but now the situation is completely upside down," Wu Xiaohui, senior campus recruitment consultant with Shanghai Foreign Service Co Ltd (SFSC), told China Daily yesterday.
According to SFSC's report, two-thirds of students have sent out more than 30 resumes since last autumn, with one frenzied student even sending out 600 copies to recruiters, Wu said. "The financial turmoil is forcing us to take advantage of every possibility to find a job because many companies have stopped recruiting," said Xiao Qin, 22, a student from Shanghai International Studies University.
Jia Dong, a computer major graduate, said, "I have hardly missed a chance to hand out my resume since last year - job fairs, campus recruitment sessions or even by e-mail. With more than 120 copies of my resume out there I think I deserve better."
The report, released Saturday by SFSC, the city's largest employment agency, surveyed 519 undergraduate and graduate students from 12 local universities.
"The time after the Chinese Spring Festival, especially March, is usually the peak season for fresh graduates to sign job contracts with employers," Wu Xiaohui, senior campus recruitment consultant with SFSC, said.
According to another survey by SFSC, about 55 percent of the city's 104 multinational corporations didn't intend to recruit new staff this year amid the deepening recession.
Among those who plan to hire, half will recruit fewer than 10 people, compared with an average of 50 to 100 people in previous years.
Earlier this month, the SFSC teamed up with 157 multinational corporations to offer 1,000 vocational training opportunities, 1,000 internship positions and 1,000 job openings for graduates in the city to help ease the shrinking job market.
Taiwan job seekers expand search to China
March 23rd, 2009Taipei - Taiwan's economic woes are causing an increasing number of the island's residents to search for work in China, a job placement agency said Friday.
According to the 104 Job Bank, an average of 22,000 Taiwan job seekers a day contacted the placement agency in March, asking for for jobs in China, up 20 per cent from February and up 30 per cent year-on-year.
The figure is the highest since the human resources agency started operations in 1996.
In March the company could offer 5,300 jobs in China so far, one job for every four job seekers wishing to work in China.
All those jobs were provided by China-based Taiwan companies for which the placement centre serves as as online 'matchmaker.'
Taiwan's jobless rate hit a record 5.33 per cent in January, driven up by the global financial crisis.
Taiwan media reported on a growing number of people committing suicide after losing the jobs and running into debts.
More teaching jobs for graduates
March 20th, 2009Schools across China will hire 50,000 college graduates as short-term teachers this year to help ease employment pressure.
That is almost triple the number of teachers hired last year.
They will work under three-year contracts with local education departments and be paid by a special central government fund, the Ministry of Education said.
"Most of the jobs are only open to students who will graduate from colleges this year," ministry spokeswoman Xu Mei said on Wednesday.
"But some teaching positions are open to outstanding degree holders who graduated in past years, such as those who have volunteer teaching experience in rural schools," she said.
The short-term teacher project was launched in 2006 to help college graduates find employment.
The teachers will work at primary and high schools, mostly in rural areas.
Besides salary from the central government, they may get bonuses and subsidies from local governments, Xu said.
After the three-year contract expires, schools will decide whether to renew the contracts.
The teachers will be recruited through public job fairs.
The ministry also announced other policies this week to help ease employment pressure on college graduates.
Graduates recruited by the army will have their education loans paid by the government and those who are awarded an honor in the army can be recruited as postgraduate students without taking the difficult entrance examination.
The country will also provide subsidies and reduce taxes for small and middle-sized enterprises that recruit college graduates this year.
To promote employment, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MHRSS) urged local departments to create more jobs for graduates.
"Local governments will provide special subsidies for college graduates who work at the grassroots," Wang Yadong, deputy director of MHRSS' employment promotion department, said in an earlier interview.
Special funds and subsidies have been earmarked to encourage college graduates to work in rural and grassroots positions or to start their own businesses.
However, "most graduates are focusing on jobs in large cities and few would like to start their own businesses", Wang said.
A recent study by the MHRSS found only 0.3 percent of college graduates in 2007 started their own businesses.
That is much lower than some developed countries where the rate is about 40 percent.
A total of 6.11 million fresh graduates - 520,000 more than in 2008 - are expected to enter the job market this year.
Chinese Car Designers: Lots of Talent, Few Job Prospects
March 18th, 2009China’s car makers are increasingly ambitious, as illustrated by plans to grow at home and, in some cases, expand abroad. One big impediment they face in taking on their foreign rivals: design.
Big global companies spend years, and millions of dollars, designing new cars. But many home-grown Chinese auto makers actually do very little of that.
A senior executive of one small auto maker in Hebei recently laid it out for us over a cup of tea: the reason his company can sell cars much cheaper than foreign auto makers who also produce cars in China, he said, is that his company does no engineering or design work whatsoever. Instead, they tell an outside engineering consultant which existing model they want to copy, and ask them to come up with a product counterfeited in a way that it won’t attract intellectual property lawsuits. In some cases that means companies combining styling ideas from two separate cars into one.
The problem isn’t a lack of talent — as China Journal found one recent day on a visit to the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. There we met Phoenix Wang and Jackie Lin, two students whose edgy car designs have put them near the top of their class. Both Wang, a 22 year old from Sichuan, and Lin, a 23 year old from Guangdong, have long been determined to pursue car design professionally. But they and their peers have dim prospects in a domestic industry that doesn’t value their skills.
Their instructor is trying to change that. Ed Wong is a former General Motors Corp. designer who over the past five years also has worked off and on as an outside design consultant for Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Corp., helping the company come up with uniquely-designed and –styled cars of its own, which it aims to launch over the next few years. Wong — a 1987 graduate of the Art Center College of Design, the Harvard of car design, in Pasadena, Calif. — went to work at GM’s main design studio near Detroit before becoming a car-design instructor in the mid-90s, teaching car design in California and Hong Kong.
Since arriving in Beijing, he has designed, among other cars, the Beijing Warrior, the rugged vehicle China’s army now uses as its main jeep, and the Beijing 800 sedan and several other concept cars Beijing Auto showed at the Beijing auto show in 2008.
Wong joined the Central Academy of Fine Arts last September as director of the school’s transportation design department, and he is helping change the outlook of students like Wang and Lin.
Wang says she was planning to continue her design studies in the U.S., but Wong brought with him a car-styling curriculum similar to that used at Art Center, and now she no longer feels she needs to go abroad to pursue her dream. Initially an industrial design student learning to design cell phones and bicycles, Lin says Wong “changed my life and outlook.”
Wang and Lin have it better than many of their fellow aspiring car designers. They plan, for now, to work with Wong after graduation, consulting for Beijing Auto. But until Chinese auto makers start taking design more seriously, theirs will remain a challenging job market, and a lot of talent will go to waste.
China's employment situation 'grave': minister
March 17th, 2009BEIJING -- Human Resources and Social Security Minister Yin Weimin warned of a "grave" employment situation in China on Tuesday, but said government measures to boost employment have taken "initial effects".
With the big drop in company posts, a large number of migrant workers who lost their jobs, and the labor-intensive industry falling as major victim amid global financial downturn, "the employment situation in China is very grave," he said at a press conference on the sidelines of the parliament's annual full session.
In face of the grave situation, the Chinese government has taken a series of measures, which have shown "initial effect", he said.
In the first two months of this year, China saw "a reverse on the dropping trend" in new labor posts in cities, he said.
The number of new laborers stood at 690,000 and 930,000 in January and February, compared with 550,000 and 380,000 in November and December last year, according to Yin.
China recorded the first rise in company posts in February after it dropped for four consecutive months from October last year, he said.
"It's only a moderate increase of 1 percent, but it's good news," he said.
"But can we then judge from the two pieces of good news that our employment situation is turning for the good? I think we should keep on observing the overall economic development," he said.
China's export continued the downward tendency in February and will face a "grim" situation in the "coming foreseeable months", said Chen Deming, Minister of Commerce, at the conference .
"Affected by the global economic recession, China has undergone negative growth in both import and export since last November," said Chen.
HR: Legislation drafted to put ceiling on executive salaries
March 16th, 2009The salaries of executives in China's State-owned enterprises (SOEs) could soon be limited.
A drafted regulation reportedly caps the salary of senior executives at no more than 10-12 times the average of regular SOE staff salaries. The plan also limits the growth of executive pay to no faster than the expansion rate of corporate profits.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, in the first three quarters of 2008, the average income of SOE employees was 20,576 yuan.
"The salaries of executives in SOEs should be controlled because they are appointed by the government, not chosen by their market value and SOEs enjoy more favorable policies and resources than their private counterparts," said Liu Junsheng, a researcher with the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.
The financial sector will be the first regulated, with a reported ceiling of 2.8 million yuan on executives' annual pretax salary.
Executive pays came under the spotlight after Guotai Jun'an Securities Co, one of China's leading State-sector brokerages, revealed a package of 3.2 billion yuan for executive "compensation and welfare" in 2008.
If the 3-billion-yuan total compensation was equally shared by the company's 3,200 employees, each would receive about 1 million yuan, or 88 times an average urban worker's annual income.
The financial services industry suffered major losses so the financial companies' hefty payout deals drew widespread public ire.
An online survey conducted by ifeng.com showed that over 96 percent of netizens said the performance of the executives in SOEs did not match their high salaries.
The salaries of many high-level executives in SOEs are also not transparent to the public. Human resources consulting firm Mercer conducted studies on executives compensation for China's CSI 300 Index companies traded in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges since 2005, using publicly disclosed information and found the disclosed compensation information for executives is limited compared to those listed in countries such as the US.
"People have a right to know about executive salaries, including the specific amount, their performance evaluation method and performance results. But this kind of information is not available for companies on the Chinese mainland," said Zheng Wei, managing director for Asia executive remuneration business with Mercer.
According to the Mercer report, in 2007, most bank presidents' compensation was about 10-20 times that of an average staff salary. The report also said the salaries of senior executives in State banks have little connection to the banks' performance.
The highest pay package in financial industry in 2007 was as much as 66 million yuan for Ma Mingzhe, chairman of Ping An Insurance (Group) Co, which garnered criticism on Internet forums.
A draft of a general regulation to cap salaries of high-level executives in SOEs will be submitted to the State Council for approval soon, said Liu.
HR: Top brass may get no pay hikes
March 13th, 2009Senior executives at nearly a quarter of Chinese companies would see no increase in their compensation packages this year, a survey by human resources consulting firm, Mercer, has found.
In all, 59 companies in China were included in the survey, of which 76 percent were listed companies and 39 percent, multinationals.
Around 34 percent of the surveyed companies said executive bonuses for 2008 would decrease. The average bonus level in Asia was 40 percent for 2008.
The global financial crisis has pushed companies to review executive compensation mechanisms. This is being done to tighten the relationship between executive pay and company strategy.
Around 49 percent of companies in China may adjust their performance evaluation standards in the next 12 months. Nearly 33 percent said they would adjust long-term evaluation standards, the survey revealed.
About 71 percent of the companies surveyed said they had a long-term incentive plan designed to retain talent. Due to the sluggish market, around 14 percent of the companies said the value of their long-term incentive plan (that will be met this year) would be lowered.
Mercer conducted similar surveys in other Asian nations, including India, South Korea, Japan and Singapore.
"In Asia, one-third of the companies surveyed said their senior executives' salaries wouldn't increase in 2009. The proportion in China is a little smaller than the average, indicating that the country is less impacted by the financial crisis," said Zheng Wei, managing director for the Asia executive remuneration business at Mercer.
"Considering the deferred impact on China's market, we expect more companies in China to take similar measures to limit senior executives' pay this year," Zheng added.
Ma Mingzhe, the chairman of Ping An Insurance (Group) Co, received the highest pay package for 2007 in the financial industry, at 66 million yuan. This was a nearly four-fold jump from his 2006 salary and was widely criticized.
About two thirds of Ma's salary in 2007 came from the long-term incentive plan. "Because of the financial crisis, companies should pay much more attention to the validity and rationality of the salary mechanism and make it palatable to staff and public supervisors," said Zheng.
Wanda to offer 60,000 new jobs in 2009
March 12th, 2009Wanda Group, one of the country's largest private property developers, will offer 60,000 new jobs this year, a company executive said on Wednesday.
"Most of the jobs are created by our rapid expansion this year," Wang Jianlin, Wanda's chairman, told China Daily on the sidelines of the annual sessions of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).
Wanda plans to build eight shopping malls and two five-star hotels this year. The company has spent 11 billion yuan in grabbing five pieces of land in Shijiazhuang, Tangshan, Tianjin, Hefei and Hohhot since the fourth quarter of last year, despite the sluggish property market.
Xinjiang vows job offers to fresh graduates
March 11th, 2009Unemployed graduates will get a job offer within 12 hours of an application in the capital of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, officials said Monday.
A record 58,000 graduates are expected to enter the job market in the region this year, up 9 percent from last year, prompting Xinjiang to roll out a slew of measures to help them find jobs amid the financial crisis.
"We can ensure that a graduate student can get at least one offer within 12 hours in Urumqi," said Li Zhi, party head of Urumqi. Li is in Beijing to attend the ongoing session of the National People's Congress.
Although he didn't say what kind of positions would be offered to students, he said that priority would be given to ethnic minority students.
"We will encourage employers to hire ethnic minority students and the government at all levels will arrange positions for them," Li said.
The efforts are part of a package for all Xinjiang graduates as the region aims to maintain an employment rate of over 70 percent among fresh graduates, said Tian Wen, party chief of Xinjiang personnel bureau.
Xinjiang's relatively small economy, however, means that there will be fewer urban jobs than the number of new graduates. As a result, they will be urged to go to the countryside to teach or practice as medical workers. Five percent college graduates in the region have been working in rural areas since last year.
"We offer tailored positions to students to support medical and educational developments in rural Xinjiang," Tian said.
She did not specify how many such positions are offered but said that 80 percent positions are reserved for ethnic minority students.
Both officials called for graduates to take frontline jobs, with Tian saying multiple vacancies exist in the public welfare sector.
Besides, the region has also established five job-training bases in Ili Kazak autonomous prefecture, Urumqi and Aksu. Among the other measures to boost employment among new graduates are subsidizing companies that employ graduates, offering small loans to graduates starting their own businesses, employment guidance to students and organizing specialized job fairs.
Bank of China to hire 10,000 college grads
March 10th, 2009Bank of China, the country's third-largest lender, plans to recruit 10,000 college graduates to staff its expanding networks, its president said.
The hiring "will be the biggest among the country's commercial banks," the Beijing Times reported, citing Li Lihui, president of Bank of China.
The nation's biggest foreign exchange bank will also expand its networks this year and some of the new recruits will be assigned to those outlets, Li said on the sidelines of the annual sessions of the National People's Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).
The Beijing-based lender also said on Saturday that Temasek Holdings Pte, which owns 4.1 percent of the bank, would not sell its stake until at least June 30, Xinhua News Agency reported, citing Chairman Xiao Gang.
Temasek, Singapore's government-owned investment company, has 10.48 billion Hong Kong-listed shares of Bank of China.
Xiao also denied rumors that Bank of China will take its Hong Kong subsidiary BOC Hong Kong private.
Job market stable as companies fold
March 9th, 2009Nearly 1,000 enterprises in Guangdong province's Shenzhen went under last year, but the local job market remained stable, Mayor Xu Zongheng said yesterday.
"The global economic meltdown has had remarkable impact on Shenzhen's development, which largely depends on the overseas market for economic and trade growth," Xu told reporters on the sidelines of the ongoing National People's Congress session in Beijing.
Up to 60 percent of Shenzhen's foreign-funded enterprises are from neighboring Hong Kong, and most goods sent from Shenzhen to overseas markets are exported through the special administrative region, Xu said.
As many as 903 enterprises folded last year, leaving about 3 percent of the city's labor force, or 90,000 migrant workers, jobless, Xu said. "More than 60 percent of these enterprises had to close their doors because they were unable to sustain business in the global financial crisis' wake," he said.
The rest - nearly 300 enterprises - were closed because they failed to meet environmental protection requirements, Xu said.
But the city last year approved up to 35,800 new enterprises, of which half are involved in the modern service and hi-tech sectors, Xu pointed out.
"These new enterprises have greatly helped create more employment for migrant workers, ensuring the job market remained stable," he said.
About 4.5 million migrant workers left the city last year, but some 4.9 million have returned after the Spring Festival, Xu said.
"We attach great importance to migrant workers' employment, and have used a series of measures to help them get back to work in the city since the end of last year," Xu said.
These included free job markets organized by local labor authorities and enterprises, and free training courses for migrant workers, Xu said.
"Migrant workers who have been employed in Shenzhen for a certain period of time are allowed to apply for residence permits," Xu said.
In another development, Xu said people with temporary residence permits in Shenzhen could also apply for Hong Kong tourism passes with unlimited entries from May.
Also, Shenzhen's permanent residence permit holders would be able to visit Hong Kong with unlimited passes from April to enhance the two cities' integration, Xu said. Shenzhen currently has 2.32 million people with permanent residence cards and 6.44 million with temporary permits, he said.
Survey: 23% of China firms to freeze executives' salaries
March 5th, 2009A report by the human resources consulting firm Mercer shows that 23 percent of companies surveyed in China said their senior executives' compensation in 2009 wouldn't increase as usual, showing the effects of the global financial slowdown.
The survey involved 59 companies in China, 76 percent of which were listed companies and 39 percent of which were multinationals. Mercer conducted similar surveys in other Asian countries, including India, South Korea, Japan and Singapore.
"In Asia, one third of companies surveyed said their senior executives' salaries wouldn't increase in 2009. The proportion in China is a little smaller than the average, reflecting China experiencing less impact of the financial crisis than other Asian countries," said Zheng Wei, managing director for Asia executive remuneration business with Mercer.
"Considering the deferred impact on China's market, we predicted that more companies in China will take similar measures to limit the senior executives' salaries in 2009," Zheng added.
Wen encourages self-employment among the jobless
March 3rd, 2009Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Saturday showed his concern over the country's jobless migrant workers and other unemployed people and encouraged them to start self-employment.
Wen said he had been deeply concerned over the employment issue, including those of migrant workers, college graduates and jobless urban families.
He was in response to a netizen's question on-line saying "as one member of the migrant labor force I felt very difficult to find jobs when the financial woes unfolded." The netizen said he hoped to start his own business via small loans which could be repayed in three or five years.
"Your requirement is reasonable," he said while chatting with netizens at the central government website (www.gov.cn).
"Employment is not only related to one's livelihood but also one's dignity," Wen said.
Migrant workers were a special social group born in China's social transition after the initiation of the reform and opening-up policy.
Earlier official figures show about 15.3 percent of the 130 million migrant workers had returned jobless from cities to the countryside against the backdrop of the global economic downturn.
Wen said he acknowledged that the statistics were not quite accurate as some people believed the number of laid-off migrant workers amounted to 20 million and others said the number was about 12 million.
"We do not want to comment the accuracy of the statistics at the moment. The fact is that the financial crisis has caused a huge impact on migrant workers," he said.
As a saying goes "a city fire causes calamity to pond fish", Wen said migrant workers bore the most severe impact of the financial woes.
He said migrant workers did not have much complaint over the government and quietly returned to their hometowns, "some engaging in farming again, others still seeking jobs."
Wen said the government should encourage them to start their own business by offering tax stimulus and training opportunities.
China's State Council, or the cabinet, issued a notice on February 10 that urged governments at all levels to make every possible effort to expand employment.
"I want to take the opportunity to extend my gratitude to our migrant workers," he said, adding they had made great contribution to the nation.
America's loss is China and India's gain: US study
March 3rd, 2009WASHINGTON: Loss of tens of thousands of skilled immigrants to countries like China and India "is an economic catastrophe that will hurt US
competitiveness for decades to come", says Vivek Wadhwa, lead author of a new study done at leading American universities.
Wadhwa and his team at Duke, Harvard and Berkeley universities uncovered several trends in their study on the plight of 1,203 skilled immigrants who came to the US from China and India to work or study and returned home:
* Most returnees originally came to the United States for career and educational opportunities. The majority of returnees cited career and quality of life as primary reasons to return to their home countries.
* The most common professional factor (86.8 percent of Chinese and 79.0 percent of Indians) motivating workers to return home was the growing demand for their skills in their home countries.
* Returnees also believed that their home countries provided better career opportunities than they could find in America.
* Most respondents (53.5 percent of Indian and 60.7 percent of Chinese) said opportunities to start their own businesses were better in their home countries.
* Most respondents (56.6 percent of Indians and 50.2 percent of Chinese) indicated that they would be likely to start a business in the next five years.
* Being close to family and friends was a significant consideration in the decision to return home, with many returnees considering their opportunities to care for ageing parents to be much better in their home countries (89.4 percent of Indians and 78.8 percent of Chinese).
* Most of the Indian and Chinese immigrant subjects who returned to their home countries were relatively young (in their low-30s) and were very well educated. Nearly 90 percent held master's and PhD degrees, primarily in management, technology or science.
* Immigrants historically have provided one of America's greatest competitive advantages. Between 1990 and 2007, the proportion of immigrants in the US labour force increased from 9.3 percent to 15.7 percent, and a large and growing proportion of immigrants bring high levels of education and skill to the US.
* Immigrants have contributed disproportionately in the most dynamic part of the US economy - the high-tech sector - co-founding firms such as Google, Intel, eBay and Yahoo.
* In addition, immigrant inventors contributed to more than a quarter of US global patent applications. Immigrant-founded US-based companies employed 450,000 workers and generated $52 billion in revenue in 2006.
China Aviation Giant To Recruit Foreign Execs
March 2nd, 2009China's huge state aircraft maker AVIC said on Thursday it will look beyond national borders to recruit foreign executives who can help it compete internationally.
The unusual global recruitment effort comes just months after the Aviation Industry Corporation of China was formed by the merger of two state aircraft makers, focusing on big projects such as a locally developed regional jet to reduce China's reliance on Boeing and Airbus.
The move by the AVIC group, which consists of more than 200 enterprises and 21 listed companies, was out of the norm for a secretive company that also builds the aviation hardware for China's military.
"Our goal is to become globally competitive," Gao Jianshe, the group's executive vice president, told reporters. "And to do that, we need executives with international experience."
The group, which notched up 2008 sales of CNY166 billion yuan (USD$24.3 billion), compared with USD$60.1 billion for Boeing, aims to recruit 13 vice presidents to assist in a broad range of activities including research, asset management, business development and marketing.
The recruitment move comes after Boeing posted an unexpected fourth-quarter loss and said it could cut 10,000 job this year, while expecting more plane order cancellations.
AVIC's move towards globalisation is not confined to staff.
State media said last month that China welcomed investors to take a 30 percent stake in its newly incorporated jet engine company -- in which AVIC holds a 40 percent stake -- that supplies engines to the regional jet ARJ21.
China has signed up a total of 208 orders for the ARJ21, unveiled in late 2007, but the vast majority are from domestic carriers.
Employment crisis 'top of NPC agenda'
February 27th, 2009Discussions about the current tough employment situation will soar to "unprecedented heights" at this year's annual parliamentary sessions, a senior lawmaker said yesterday.
"Employment will be one of the main topics at the two meetings," Zheng Gongcheng, a member of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, said. "The discussions will focus on job stimulus policies and government investment to boost employment."
Since the global financial crisis began, about 20 million migrant workers have lost their jobs. Also, about 7.5 million college graduates will enter the job market this year, with the number of jobs available at a two-year lowin the first half of the year.
The urban registered unemployment rate, which excludes migrant workers, jumped for the first time in five years to 4.2 percent as of Dec 31, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security said. It is expected to hit 4.6 percent this year, the highest level since 1980.
In the Monday's government work report to be submitted to the coming NPC meeting, employment is a very important part of the central government's future work, Zheng said.
"Priority should be given to college graduates and migrant workers," he said.
Some experts have said the rising unemployment rate will be a threat to social stability and have urged the government to do more to create jobs.
Zheng, a scholar in social security at the Renmin University of China, said: "All the policies need huge investment. I expect the government will put more money into the employment services."
Lenovo to cut 450 international employees
February 26th, 2009China's largest computer maker Lenovo today said it would lay off 450 international employees in China to further reduce cost.
Those employees affected are the supporting staff of the company's oversea business, the company said.
"In light of the global economic problems, we must act decisively to reduce costs associated with global staffing and support functions to ensure our competitive strength," said Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo CEO, in a statement. "While our business in China remains very strong, many of our global support functions have employees based in China."
The latest round of layoffs will be completed by the end of next month, the company said.
Biz moves
February 25th, 2009Hand joins LaSalle
David Hand has been promoted as investment head for China in Jones Lang LaSalle after seven years as managing director of Jones Lang LaSalle Beijing and head of the China Retail Business. Hand said he expects to leverage the strong relations he and the Pan-China Investments teams have had with local and international developers and investors to facilitate transactions between these groups in China.
Sang is Lafarge CEO
French cement and building materials manufacturer Lafarge SA has appointed Sang Kang as chief executive officer in place of Cyrille Ragoucy, who was previously in charge of its business expansion in China. Ragoucy is returning to the company's French headquarters where he will take up a new position. Sang jointed Lafarge in 2003 after working for several years with Boston Consulting Group as partner and board director.
Ford new Starwood VP
Starwood Asia Pacific Hotels and Resorts has appointed Stephen Ford as vice-president and area managing director for South China, and general manager of Sheraton Sanya Resort. Ford has more than 40 years of management and work experience in the hospitality industry. Prior to this he was Starwood's regional vice-president for India, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Ford joined Starwood in 2001 as general manager of the Westin Bund Center, Shanghai.
WuXi CFO steps down
WuXi PharmaTech has said Benson Tsang, chief financial officer, is leaving the company for personal reasons at the end of this month. Edward Hu, chief operating officer, will act as acting CFO until a replacement is found. Tsang joined WuXi PharmaTech in 2006 as CFO.
The company's board has formed a search committee to recruit a new CFO. Tsang has agreed to provide transition services and to assist in recruiting his successor.
Unicom appoints Lu
China Unicom has appointed Lu Yimin as president, while Chang Xiaobing will continue to act as chairman and CEO, effective Feb 13. Zuo Xunsheng, Li Jianguo, Pei Aihua, Zhao Jidong, Li Fushen, Li Gang, Zhang Jun'an and Jiang Zhengxin were appointed senior vice-presidents of the company. Lu Yimin and Zuo Xunsheng remain as company executive directors.
The appointment signals the closing of the Unicom-Netcom merger.
McQuillan named GM
British Airways has appointed Kevin McQuillan as its regional general manager for the Far East with effect from March 2. Based in Hong Kong, McQuillan will be responsible for the airline's commercial interests on the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Philippines.
231 companies say no to pay cuts
February 20th, 2009A total of 231 local firms said they will not cut salaries this year, a survey has found.
Of the 308 companies polled by consultancy firm Mercer, 20 percent make consumer goods, 19 percent are hi-tech firms, 17 percent are in machinery and electronics, and the rest span a variety of other industries.
Sixty percent, including Lenovo, P&G, Unilever, Dupont and Wanke Real Estate, are based in major cities.
Just about six firms said they will resort to salary cuts as a means of combating the financial crisis, while 154 said they will offer lower pay rises.
The rest said they have not made a final decision yet.
Liu Jianli, director of salaries and welfare at Lenovo, said: "We don't have any plans to cut salaries, but there will be limits on pay rises and we will be more cautious in recruiting new people."
Xu Jun, public affairs manager at Dupont Inc in Shanghai, said it too has no plans to cut salaries.
In another survey, by Kingfield Management, 75 percent of the 216 Pearl River Delta firms polled said they will not lay off staff this year.
Forty percent said they will increase wages but by a lower percentage than last year.
With its high number of export-oriented firms, the Pearl River Delta has felt the full brunt of the financial crisis.
Last year, the central government implemented policies that allow companies to defer contributions to pension funds and make lower employee insurance payments.
Hire graduates without local hukou
February 18th, 2009In a move to further encourage companies to hire more young people, the State Council has asked every city in China - except four - to drop the permanent residency requirement when hiring non-native college graduates.
In a recent document, the State Council has asked cities, except for Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing, to lift hukou, or the residency permit restriction so that applicants can move almost anywhere for a job.
The document comes after a job stimulus package was unveiled in early January intended to help college students find jobs amid the economic slowdown.
"The Chinese job market is grim amid the global financial crisis and college graduates are facing huge pressure finding jobs," it said.
College graduates are a "valuable" human resource, and all local governments and all related departments should give top priority to the employment of college graduates with more innovative measures."
The document also says that labor-intensive small enterprises can receive up to 2 million yuan ($300,000) in loans if they employ a certain number of registered jobless urban residents.
The major State-owned enterprises and scientific research institutions were also urged to offer more jobs for graduates.
The State Council also encouraged college students to broaden their job search and consider working in grassroots communities, central and western parts of China or SMEs, or start their own business.
The self-employed graduates can get individual small loans of up to 50,000 yuan.
An earlier report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said the unemployment rate among new graduates surpassed 12 percent at the end of 2008, and that 1.5 million were without work.
According to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, 6.1 million fresh college graduates will enter the job market this year.
"The employment of college students should come first in the whole employment stimulus package," Zheng Gongcheng, the country's leading social security scholar and senior lawmaker, told China Daily.
He said college students and their families have invested lots of money in education with high expectations for a future career.
"If many college graduates cannot find proper jobs, it is a huge waste of social resources," Zheng said.
But most fresh job seekers want stimulus policies to be more concrete.
"I am not clear about the measures and I don't think they have much to do with me," Xu Baoxin, 22, a new graduate of Southeast University in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, said yesterday.
"They are too vague and the lifting of hukou restrictions may only be helpful for those who want to work in big cities," Xu said.
Another job seeker, Tang Jianye, said the stimulus policies are a little bit late and they need more employment related services.
"It (the policy) is late but it's better than nothing," the graduate from Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics said.
In another step to help graduates find jobs, Beijing municipal government plans to hire college graduates as community assistants, a new position created by the local government, in a bid to encourage them to work at grassroots level.
1 million graduates to get job training
February 17th, 2009China will launch a graduate trainee program for one million unemployed college graduates in three years, according to a circular issued by the general office of the State Council on Sunday.
The program did not suggest a fixed length or pay scale of the training, but the circular demanded local governments and organizations which provided training to offer basic living subsidies to the trainees.
The government would build training bases for the program with responsible employers, and employers are encouraged to recruit graduate trainees, said the circular.
Besides the trainee program, the government would also enhance technical training for graduates from vocational schools with a "double certificates" program.
According to the program, schools would help the students get vocational qualification certificates when they leave school, in addition to their graduate certificates.
China had about 1.5 million unemployed college graduates by the end of 2008, registering an unemployment rate of 12 percent, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said in the Blue Book of China's Economy (2009) last December.
Brokers post earnings drop and cut salaries
February 13th, 2009Latest 2008 figures from 50 stock brokerage firms showed an average 68.91 percent fall in profit from 2007 and a 11.99 percent cut in annual executive pay.
Industry analysts said the pay cut in 2008 would have been much deeper if it had not been for the deferred payment of the 2007 bonus.
Of the 50 brokerage firms, five said their average executive compensation was above one billion yuan ($146 million), with Guotai Jun'an Securities Co topping the list with 3.07-billion-yuan total staff payout, up 96.8 percent from a year before. The other four were Guangfa Securities, China Merchants Securities, CITIC China Securities and Guoxin Securities.
The total staff payout of the five brokerage firms totaled 9.11 billion yuan, exceeding the combined 7.4 billion yuan of the other 45 companies.
Resume helps migrants too
February 12th, 2009More rural migrant workers should learn how to use resumes to enhance their job-seeking missions, says an article in Dazhong Daily. The following is an excerpt:
At a recent job fair in Wuhan, Yu Bo, a 41-year-old rural migrant worker, used a carefully designed resume, rarely used by his peers, to win the hearts of recruiters.
Yu designed his resume as fashionably as college graduates usually do - he put into a file holder all the sheets that describe his work experience, skills and talents, achievements, and various types of certificates and diplomas. A secondary technical school graduate as Yu is, he left a deep impression on recruiters.
Usually, resumes seem to be the exclusive tool for college graduates to find jobs and few migrants have ever used resumes to boost their chances of being hired. Yu's innovative action has set a good example for his peers.
Rural migrant workers have long been the disadvantaged group in the job market - they don't dress up for job fairs and don't expect too much about working conditions and payment; they lack confidence and have few skills to sell themselves to the market.
Today's rural migrant workers are no longer only working with their muscles. They should rely more on their brains. Resumes are an effective tool for them to show off their talents and past achievements to their would-be employers
Companies to inform govt of layoffs 30 days prior
February 11th, 2009As layoffs and labor disputes become frequent with the global economic slowdown wiping out more businesses, the central government yesterday told employers to inform trade unions of their plans of mass layoffs at least 30 days in advance.
If a company plans to layoff more than 20 employees, or over 10 percent of the total staff in one go, it must submit written reports to the local labor and social security department 30 days prior to the action, the State Council said in a statement issued on its official website (www.gov.cn) yesterday.
The State Council emphasized that priority should be given to ensure the legal rights of the employees.
Moreover, employers should not refuse to pay for social insurance as long as the working relations still exist, it said.
Local labor officials should keep a watch on such companies to ensure employers do not flee or postpone wages and insurance payment, it said.
Mo Rong, deputy chief of the labor science research institute under the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, said stable employment should be the top priority under the current financial circumstances.
"In the long term, mass layoffs are not good for the development of an enterprise," he said.
The government has launched a series of favorable policies "to either reduce or postpone five types of social security insurance fees to give private enterprises some relief", he added.
"The State Council's notice reiterated the regulation of Labor Law, and it is a good reminder to both enterprises and employers," Li Kui, a lawyer of the Beijing-based Yingke Law Firm, told China Daily.
"But I hope the regulation would be further clarified, as different scales of companies and official organizations that manage layoffs need to be more clear," he said.
Meng Qinghuan, an employer of a Beijing-based fund management company, said he was doubtful if the new regulation would be implemented successfully.
"Some small enterprises have no ability to anticipate the crisis and go bankrupt overnight," he said.
Rising unemployment a key challenge for China
February 10th, 2009Rising unemployment rather than economic slowdown appears to be the biggest challenge for the Chinese economy this year, according to economists.
According to a report by China Economic Monitoring and Analysis Center, over 90 percent of the 100 economists surveyed expressed the view that the growing number of jobless is the top challenge for the economy, followed by economic slowdown and social instability.
The survey, conducted in December, also revealed that economists' confidence in the economy has dropped to its lowest since 2004, when it was first introduced.
"The survey results show that government policies should be directed at addressing unemployment," said Lin Yixiang, chairman and CEO of TX Investment Consulting Co, which helped to conduct the survey.
The rising concern over unemployment also underscores the gloomy prospects of the nation's job market. Over the past few months, more than 20 million migrant workers, or a sixth of the total, have lost their jobs due to the economic slowdown.
Policymakers also forecast the registered urban unemployment rate, which excludes migrant workers, will hit 4.6 percent in 2009, up from 4.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008.
China's economic growth dropped to 9 percent in 2008, compared with 13 percent of 2007. The International Monetary Fund has predicted that the nation's growth would further decline to 6.7 percent this year, far below the long-time 8 percent target of the Chinese government.
As a response to the economic slowdown, the government announced a 4 trillion yuan stimulus package last November to prop up the weakening economy. Meanwhile, it's also drafting a plan to bolster the development of 10 key industries. Policymakers later said in January that they plan to spend 850 billion yuan by 2011 to provide accessible and affordable healthcare to the country's 1.3 billion people.
A total of 86 percent of the economists said the government's fiscal policy should focus on social spending, including education, medical care and improving the social security system. Economists also want the government to reduce direct investment in infrastructure projects, due to concerns about misallocation of resources and corruption.
More than 70 percent of the economists surveyed believed that the Chinese economy would continue to lose steam this year with the lowest point likely to occur in the second quarter. Three-fifths of the economists said the global economy would only start to recover in 2010.
China to train jobless graduates as crisis bites
February 9th, 2009BEIJING (Reuters) - The Chinese government will help train 1 million unemployed university graduates over the next three years and will give loans to companies who hire them, state media said on Sunday, as the economic crisis starts to bite.
Premier Wen Jiabao warned earlier this month that college graduates face a "grim" job market as a global slowdown seizes the economy.
Now the State Council, or Cabinet, is offering training and loans to help graduates, the official Xinhua news agency said.
Students loans will be waived either partially or in full for graduates willing to work in rural areas or join the armed forced, the report said.
The government will also offer loans of up to 2 million yuan ($292,400) to labor-intensive companies who recruit graduates, it added.
And loans of 50,000 yuan each will be given to graduates who want to set up their own business, Xinhua said.
China has more than economic reasons to fear surging graduate unemployment. It is also a potential political time bomb.
This year will mark the 20th anniversary of the crackdown on pro-democracy protests led by radicalized students. Unsettling discontent could spread again as millions of graduates, whose families have paid steeply for their education, look for work.
The government has encouraged more students to go to university as a way to boost skills and consumer spending, but at the end of 2008 about 1 million of that year's graduates had not found work.
With some 6.1 million students leaving colleges and universities in 2009 -- about half a million more than last year -- labor authorities have repeatedly warned them not to be fussy.
China advances vocational training to help laid-off workers
February 6th, 2009About 4 million laid-off worker in China attended vocational training for reemployment in 2008, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security said Monday.
Another 400,000 received education to start self-employed business, which encouraged individuals to be their own bosses and make a living, the ministry's spokesman Yin Chengji said.
"We have set up special funds and are using social unemployment benefits to strengthen training for workers. We also emphasize vocational training for the laid-offs, especially the migrant workers," Yin said.
He said the training would cushion the impact of the global financial crisis and was aimed at stabilizing the employment situation in the country.
East China's Shandong province had organized training programs for 230,000 laid-offs last year, and 75 percent of those trained found new jobs, according to local government figures.
The Ministry of Finance also said in mid-January it would play a leading role in creating jobs in government-initiated projects such as civil infrastructure building and environmental protection.
Deputies call for guarantee of jobs for migrant workers
February 5th, 2009The Shanghai municipal government should set aside certain employment vacancies for migrant job seekers after the Spring Festival holiday, three migrant worker deputies to the city's people's congress suggested.
With the worldwide financial crisis showing no signs of slowing down, migrant workers returning home are worried about losing their jobs after coming back from the holiday, according to Zhang Xiongwei, Hong Gang and Pan Aifang, the three people elected to represent the city's five million migrant workers before the local legislative body.
"The government should do something to make them go home happily and come back with a hope (to find a job). Migrant workers make a huge contribution to Shanghai's fast development," Zhang said.
The deputies said some vacancies at construction projects of infrastructure facilities and at services in which the government pays to take care of the old, poor and sick should be set aside for them.
The government should include unemployed migrant workers in the city's reemployment services system, in which the government trains and helps the unemployed find jobs, they added.
"I also suggest the government take measures to ensure a stable job market and prevent companies from taking advantage of the crisis to lay off employees," Zhang said.
In the annual sessions of Shanghai Municipal People's Congress last month, Mayor Han Zheng said migrant workers, white-collar workers and university graduates face the most difficulty in securing employment, and more efforts should be made.
He said the government would subsidize companies to maintain full employment, help train the unemployed and provide better services and more loans for people to start their own businesses.
The three deputies said they have not seen a large amount of migrant workers being laid off in Shanghai. "But the worst time has not come yet," Zhang said.
China to build 5,000 internship bases for youths
February 4th, 2009China is to build up to 5,000 "bases" in 2009 to provide internship positions for the young to better prepare them for the job market as it feels pain amid the global financial crisis.
The Chinese Communist Youth League, a government body for work related to the young, will coordinate in recruiting qualified companies and individuals, the League said on Monday.
The youth leagues at municipal or provincial levels will select suitable companies to form the "bases", businesses or sets of businesses which will be able to provide positions for at least 10 interns each year with basic living allowances.
Qualified candidates for the intern positions are job-hunting fresh university or vocational school graduates, those who have failed to find a job since graduation, young laid-off workers, and young migrant workers.
The first group of nearly 2,000 such bases are already selected and made public, offering about 60,000 positions in the industries of finance, publishing, telecommunications, manufacturing and transportation.
The aim of this move is to ease the employment pressure and achieve a win-win situation between the companies and the youths, according to the Youth League.
The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security said on January 20 that there would be 7.1 million college graduates seeking vacancies this year, including 1 million of those having failed to secure jobs last year.
The ministry also said, as of the end of 2008, there were 8.86 million urban residents registered as jobless, 560,000 more than the end of the third quarter.
Govt to provide incentives to job-seeking college graduates
February 3rd, 2009China's State Council announced over the weekend a plan to provide incentives to job-seeking college graduates, including professional training and preferential loans for start-ups.
The government said it would help train one million unemployed college graduates in the coming three years to make them better qualified for jobs.
The Cabinet also said that civil service posts and state-owned companies should not charge job application fees from college graduates whose families are in financial hardship.
For graduates who are willing to work in rural areas or join the armed forces, the loans for completing their college education might be partially or fully waived, the notice said.
Labor-intensive companies are also encouraged to recruit college graduates, with preferential government loans up to two million yuan ($293,000) for each company.
Any graduates who are willing to kick off their own business would qualify for small loans of 50,000 yuan each.
The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security said that as of December 31, there were 8.86 million urban residents registered as unemployed, 560,000 more than at the end of the third quarter.
Premier Wen welcomes foreign talents
February 2nd, 2009Premier Wen Jiabao has welcomed foreign talents to start, as well as develop their careers in the country.
Addressing 19 foreign experts who have helped China's reform and opening up, Wen said the government is committed to its economic policy.
China will stick to the opening-up policy and continue introducing advanced foreign technology and expertise in management to secure powerful intellectual resources and maintain a steady economic growth. The government will also try hard to create a favorable working condition for foreign experts in China, he added.
Companies cut executive pay
January 23rd, 2009Many companies in the country are resorting to executive pay cuts to deal with the global economic slowdown, executives and human resources managers have said.
The moves are reportedly being made in industries such as aviation, steel, power generation, petrochemical, finance, information technology, securities and real estate.
Similarly, Chinese companies including State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are planning to scale back their reward schemes for staff this year as they find ways to cut costs, industry observers have said.
Sany Heavy Industry Co, one of the country's largest heavy machinery manufacturers, made headlines recently when its chairman Liang Wengen offered to cut his salary this year to 1 yuan, while the company cut other board members' salaries by 90 percent.
Leading aluminum producer Chalco reportedly plans to cut executive pay by as much as 50 percent, after profits plunged last year on declining metal prices.
China Eastern Airlines' management teams are also expected to have their wages slashed by up to 30 percent, local media reported.
Human resources experts told China Daily such moves showing executives' efforts to share some pain with rank-and-file employees can shore up goodwill among employees, when broader pay cuts and workforce reductions are announced.
"But such moves will not necessarily drag these companies back to the black. It is just one of the many strategies they have to take," said Luo Zhongwei, a senior researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Luo said the deteriorating economic situation could also force some companies to reflect upon their operations.
"Fast growth can cover up a lot of problems. Some of our employees were spending lavishly. These problems are exposed when the outside environment worsens. We must execute cost-saving initiatives now," said Duan Dawei, Sany's vice-president and finance director.
China's unemployment rate climbs
January 22nd, 2009China's urban registered unemployment rate jumped for the first time in five years to 4.2 percent as of Dec 31, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security said on Tuesday.
The jobless rate, which excludes migrant workers and farmers, was 4 percent in the first three quarters of 2008, Yin Chengji, the ministry's spokesman, said.
China has raised its unemployment target to 4.6 percent this year, which would be the worst since 1980, as worsening global financial crisis takes its toll on the country's export-led economy, Yin said.
During the fourth quarter of last year, the number of registered jobless urbanites jumped to 8.86 million, 560,000 more than that in the third quarter.
However, the ministry maintained that the current unemployment situation in the country was "better than expected" and was confident to bring it under control this year.
"We are fully prepared for this year's grim job market outlook despite the global financial crisis," Yin said.
"The situation will get stable if the country's economy rebounds in the second half of this year and the job stimulus package works well."
The ministry said it aims to create jobs for 9 million new urban laborers, 5 million laid-off workers, and 1 million people, who are facing difficulties finding work, this year.
"Improving the employment situation is our top priority and everything we do is aimed at achieving the goal," he said.
More than 10 million migrant workers lost their jobs in the third quarter of 2008, after falling demand overseas forced the closure of around 670,000 factories, especially in the coastal regions, the ministry said in an earlier report.
The ministry warned again that fresh university graduates are bound to face a hard time securing jobs, with some 7.1 million entering the job market this year.
Since last year, the central government has implemented a series of economic and job stimulus measures to boost domestic demand and create more jobs.
But experts have warned that there is pressure mounting on the job market owing to the economic downturn, and "labor officials should be cautious and alert".
"The current employment situation is very severe," Chen Guangjin, an expert on employment issues with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said.
"The market cannot meet the increasing demand as lots of firms have closed down. If the government pours more investment in the labor-intensive sector, the situation can get better."
China's urban jobless rate rises, situation 'grim'
January 21st, 2009by Xinhua writers Wang Xiuqiong, Wu Qiong, Chen Yinan
BEIJING, Jan. 20 (Xinhua) -- China reported Tuesday a higher jobless rate among urbanites for 2008 as the global financial crisis builds up unemployment pressure in the world's fastest growing economy.
China's urban unemployment rate was 4.2 percent at the end of 2008, up 0.2 percentage points year on year, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MOHRSS) said Tuesday.
As of Dec. 31, there were 8.86 million urban residents registered as jobless, 560,000 more than the end of the third quarter, ministry spokesman Yin Chengji told a press conference.
Yin said 11.13 million urban jobs were created last year, 11 percent above the government target.
The slight rise in the jobless rate reflected a slowing economy amid the global financial crisis, said Tang Min, deputy secretary of the China Development Research Foundation.
"The figure looks all right, but the real situation could be much more serious, as migrant workers and newly graduated college students were not included in the government count," said Tang.
Yuan Gangming of the Center for China in the World Economy at Tsinghua University described the rate as a "sudden rise." He said the 2008 figure was a reversal of the recent years' declines.
The urban jobless rate fell for five consecutive years, from a high of 4.3 percent in 2003 to 4 percent in 2007. It stayed at 4 percent in the first three quarters of 2008.
"The 4.2 percent rate was already a sharp increase, given that widespread job cuts only surfaced in the second half of last year," Yuan said.
He agreed that the unemployment situation was grimmer than shown by the latest figure, also noting that migrant workers were not included in the count.
Yin said the employment situation was "generally under control and better than we expected", but would still be grim this year as the global financial crisis would continue to affect the Chinese economy.
Yuan estimated that the urban unemployment figure could worsen in the first half of this year.
Tang echoed his view, saying the employment pressure would continue to build up this year as the world economy was not expected to recover until the end of 2009, which was the most optimistic expectation.
GLOBAL CRISIS WOES
Yin attributed the higher jobless rate in the fourth quarter to the economic slowdown, saying the influence of the global financial crisis was "obvious".
"Some producers have experienced difficulties since the fourth quarter and shed some jobs," he said.
Weakening foreign demand has dealt a heavy blow to Chinese exporters and dragged down the economic engine since the second half of last year.
Exports fell 2.8 percent year on year to 111.16 billion U.S. dollars in December, an acceleration from the decline of 2.2 percent in November.
China aims to keep its registered jobless rate below 4.6 percent and create 9 million new urban jobs this year, up 0.1 percentage points and down 1 million respectively from last year's targets.
The government lowered the expectation for this year after considering the economic impact of the global financial crisis, said Yin, adding that he believed the goal can be achieved.
China had reacted in an "active and powerful" way to the employment impact of the global financial crisis, said Yin.
Local governments have stepped up monitoring job markets and offered free or subsidized training, among other steps, to avert large-scale job losses.
"As China's economy regains momentum, the employment environment will gradually improve and the general situation will be basically stable," he said.
The country's gross domestic product (GDP) expanded 9 percent annually in the third quarter of 2008, compared with 10.1 percent in the second quarter and 10.6 in the first quarter.
Yin estimated an increase of 1 percentage point in economic growth could create 1 million jobs.
Yuan urged for more supportive policies for small- and mid-sized enterprises, which can create more jobs than big enterprises.
"The current stimulus package is more effective in boosting industrial production than in promoting employment," said Yuan. "There should be more favors such as easier credit for small companies."
China announced a 4 trillion-yuan (586 billion U.S. dollars) fiscal stimulus package in November to increase domestic demand and sustain growth.
The government should help cornered exporters expand domestic markets and fully tap the potential of the service sector, which can soak up a much larger labor force if it is better regulated and encouraged, said Tang.
CONCERN OVER MIGRANT WORKERS
A majority of the victims of job cuts were migrant workers, most of them in the eastern and southern coastal regions, said Yin.
China has seen an increasing number of farmers leaving the countryside for better-paid jobs in coastal industrial belts in the past decades. The migrant workers were registered as rural residents.
More than 10 million, or 10 percent of a total of 130 million migrant workers, had returned to their rural homes jobless, Yu Faming, an employment official of the MOHRSS told a forum late in December, citing investigation results.
Yin said more migrant workers had returned to the countryside for the Spring Festival this year than before but specific figures were yet to be counted.
The global financial crisis was a significant reason behind the larger number of rural returnees, he said.
The MOHRSS had been collecting information on the rural returnees in ten provinces and cities. The investigation showed the general picture was "within our anticipation", Yin said.
Apart from migrant workers, the government will also focus on jobs for college graduates this year, said Yin.
There will be 7.1 million college graduates seeking vacancies this year, including 1 million of those having failed to secure jobs last year, he said.
The government will encourage them to find work in small- and mid-sized companies, private businesses and in the less developed mid-west, said Yin.
New aid measures set for jobless workers
January 20th, 2009Amid waves of job losses worldwide, China has embarked on measures to minimize them and pledged to boost employment this year.
The financial crisis continues to hurt the fourth largest economy and has pushed many enterprises to make layoffs.
The following provinces are among many in the country, East China in particular, that have striven to stabilize their job markets.
Yangtze River Delta
Yangtze River Delta, a manufacturing center, was hit exceptionally hard. Unemployment in the manufacturing sector stood at 41.43 percent of the total in Zhejiang province in the third quarter, a record low in recent years.
The same situation occurred with manufacturers in eastern Jiangsu province with unemployment in the sector accounting for 50.15 percent of the total, down 0.94 percentage point over the same period last year, and down 4.16 percentage point from the second quarter.
To cushion the blow, the Yangtze Delta has set up an early warning system to monitor the job situation. At present, six cities including Nanjing, Hangzhou and Ningbo are the trial areas.
The system is designed for regional labor and social security offices to collect employment information, such as possible job cuts and plans for new employees in the following week and the actual cuts.
Zhejiang province will do this in 11 cities this year.
At the end of November, Zhejiang also cut back enterprises' payments of social security funds for employees to mitigate the businesses' burden.
Another focus for most cities in the region is to encourage people to start businesses. Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces pledge to provide favorable incentives, including free job training for laid-off workers.
Officials and experts said the region expects a tougher job picture in the first quarter of this year as the global financial turmoil continues to spread.
Shanghai has launched programs to provide graduates and migrant workers with subsidies for skill training. On Dec 30, the first employment service base was set up in Shanghai for graduates to gain internship experiences.
The Shanghai municipal government also encouraged business start-ups to increase jobs. The city pledged to limit the registered unemployment rate to below 4.5 percent.
Across the nation
The eastern Fujian province has rolled out plans to help graduates from poor families who have difficulty in finding jobs. A service center for human resources in Fujian, and Fujian University of Technology have decided to jointly spend 120,000 yuan to aid the graduates. The university has signed with more than 30 companies to establish internship base.
The provincial government will also conduct check-ups on enterprises that intend to apply for 20 job cuts in 2009.
Jiangxi province is set to provide migrant workers with free vocational training. As of Jan. 1, 26,000 migrant workers were reemployed or started their own businesses.
The provinces of Gansu, Anhui, Hebei, Jilin and many others have adopted measures on unemployment, including training programs and loan expansion.
Provinces are set to roll out their own stimulus measures in 2009, to create more jobs.
Zhejiang province plans to inject 60 billion yuan in transportation infrastructure construction in 2009. It's estimated that every 100 million yuan investment in highways would create 1,800 direct jobs and 2,100 indirect jobs, according to the National Development and Reform Commission. That was only part of the stimulus measures in the region. Jiangxi province will invest 600 billion yuan into fixed assets such as highways, railways, airports and water projects, which will bring about one million jobs.
Investment will hit 1.2 trillion yuan in agriculture, transport, energy and urban construction in Henan province. Jiang Duyun, director of the provincial department of education, said the measures would "definitely" be beneficial for graduates majoring in such fields.
Fujian province will spend 170 billion yuan on manufacturing industries, and the western Gansu province plans 16.5 billion yuan for transport facilities and infrastructure.
Those are only part of the whole stimulus plans carried out by provinces in 2009.
"The governments are doing what they should do and these measures will prop up employment in the long run", said Wang Dewen, a labor economist from China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).
He added China now was going through industrial restructuring with new and more advanced enterprises emerging, which would demand employees with specialized skills and knowledge.
"Migrant workers are the worst hit groups and vocational training will be necessary to equip them with skills and knowledge which would qualify them for better jobs", Wang said.
According to a December report from CASS, the registered unemployment rate was estimated at 10 percent.
"With this series of measures kicking in, the job situation would be easier than expected in the second half of this year", Wang said.
The central government kicked off a stimulus package of 4 trillion yuan in last November to buoy economic growth, which, analysts agreed, would boost employment. Part of the investment had been earmarked before the package was rushed out.
Yang Yansui, a specialist in labor law and the director of the employment and Social Security Center of Tsinghua University, said the country's 4-trillion-yuan stimulus plan would create only temporary jobs. More investment should go to the public service sector, which would bring long-term and sustainable jobs.
The Minister of Human Resources and Social Security Yin Weimin said on Dec 29 that China vowed to create 9 million new jobs in urban districts this year, 1 million fewer than last year's target. The registered urban unemployment rate will be kept under 4.6 percent.
The Chinese urban unemployment rate from 2003 to 2007 was lower than 4.3 percent, but the target for 2008 was set at 4.5 percent because of the severe employment situation.
Yu Faming, director of MHRSS employment promotion department, said the oversupply of labor would be more severe this year with 24 million people seeking jobs, mainly including 13 million new urban jobseekers and 8 million laid-off workers.
China's disabled see mixed job fortunes in 2008
January 15th, 2009About 331,000 disabled Chinese in the urban areas found jobs in 2008, bringing the total to 4.67 million, but the number employed in rural areas saw a marked drop, statistics from the China Disabled Persons' Federation show.
The number of employed disabled people in rural areas fell by almost 930,000 to 16.04 million in 2008, said Wang Xinxian, secretary of the China Disabled Persons' Federation Committee of the Communist Party of China.
Wang was addressing a national work conference in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, Monday. Wang did not explain the contrast at the conference.
With the help of government and non-governmental programs, 6,193 disabled applicants were admitted into colleges and universities last year, and 675,000 received job training, federation figures showed.
Almost 102,000 homes of poverty-stricken disabled people in rural areas were renovated last year and about 3.17 million disabled people came under social insurance programs that included pension schemes, medical, unemployment and industrial accident insurance, the figures showed.
Wang said the priority this year was to speed up the building of social security and service systems for the disabled, especially for those in rural areas.
The federation would endeavor to improve education and living standards for China's 83 million disabled, who account for 6.34 percent of total population.
The federation jointly launched a three-year project with the Ministry of Science and Technology on Monday to invest 150 million yuan ($21.94 million) to develop technologies and products that may facilitate information access for the disabled.
Shanghai to look for talents abroad
January 14th, 2009Shanghai plans to send recruiters overseas once again to fill top financial jobs in Shanghai, a senior government official said.
Huang Weimao, an official with the Shanghai municipal human resources and social security bureau, said on Sunday that the bureau is taking more Chinese enterprises, colleges and institutions to Washington in May for a job fair aimed at overseas Chinese graduates.
"We are collecting information about the types and number of talents that are most in need," Huang said.
"We need talents in information technology, life sciences, pharmaceutical, finance, modern services, and auto making," he said. "But still, we will target mainly financial talents."
Huang said that the compensation packages many Chinese enterprises are offering are similar to those in developed countries.
You Weishun, director of North America Chinese Scholars International Exchange Center, said that China should take advantage of the current economic situation to attract overseas candidates.
The economic recession has left more than 100,000 Wall Street workers unemployed. He estimated that 10,000 to 20,000 of them are Chinese, many of whom are willing to work in China.
"Plus their salary expectation has dropped almost to half, from about US$80,000 per year to about 300,000 yuan per year," he told the paper.
And Shanghai has always been attractive to overseas workers, according to Huang.
In 2008, more than 5,000 overseas Chinese graduates moved to Shanghai for a job, excluding Shanghai residents who graduated from overseas schools and returned home.
Migrant workers try hand at entrepreneurship in hometowns
January 13th, 2009NANCHANG - Half a year after being laid off by a Beijing-based electronic product sales company amid the global slowdown, Yu Yanbin has become his own boss, running a leather product factory in his hometown.
Yu went back home to Gangbei Village, Xinjian County of east China's Jiangxi Province in May. Following the suggestion of a township official, he set up the factory -- Jiangxi Haobo Science and Technology Development Co., Ltd. -- in August.
"I do not need to pay rent or taxes. The government will pay half of the interest on my loan of 50,000 yuan," equivalent to about US$7,320, said Yu, 31. "All this ensured a smooth beginning."
Across the country, millions of migrant workers have gone home earlier than they did in previous years for the Lunar New Year holiday, since the factories they worked at closed or suspended production as the world economy slowed.
The Ministry of Agriculture said some 7.8 million migrant workers had returned home. Many fear they won't be able to find new jobs after the week-long Lunar New Year holiday, so they might just stay home.
The government has offered loans and tax cuts or exemptions to encourage these returnees to start their own businesses. A two-day annual central rural work conference last month decided the government would help returned farmers become entrepreneurs through loans, speedier permit approvals, tax cuts or exemptions and counseling.
Tan Sanguo, a Xinjian County official, said some 2,000 migrant workers had returned home. Some were growing mushrooms, while others had set up building material plants.
"Migrant workers have gained some knowledge of the market economy and non-agricultural industries after years of work in cities," said Cui Chuanyi, a rural economy researcher of the Development Research Center under the State Council, or cabinet.
Many also have accumulated savings and mastered certain skills, he added. "All these are favorable conditions for them to start businesses."
The expert said it was necessary to encourage migrant workers to start their own businesses, given the critical employment situation. Running a rural business would contribute to development in the countryside, he said.
But many of these former migrants lack the capital and technical skills to go into business for themselves.
A survey conducted by agricultural authorities and banks in June showed more than 50 percent of 400 rural youths they interviewed lacked funds and technology to start businesses.
Tang Nianzhou, 32, a former migrant worker from Wucun Village, Changxing County of Zhejiang Province, leased 5.3 hectares and planted some distinctive local crops such as tea. But he's been troubled by lack of funds.
In November, he managed to get a 100,000 yuan low-interest loan from the county's Rural Cooperative Bank. "That helps a lot," he said.
Job loss in real estate sector on the rise
January 12th, 2009Falling sales and tumbling prices have forced many real estate companies in major Chinese cities to cut jobs, slash salaries and trim commissions.
Some property developers are known to have laid off as many as half of their staff in the past several months.
"The cost of human resources accounts for a big share of the cash flow though it occupies a very small share in the real estate developing cost," said Li Wenjie, a managing director from Centaline Property Agency Ltd. "Since projects do not sell well in current market, it is hard to maintain a liquid cash flow"? forcing developers to cut salary expenses, he said.
Zhujiang Real Estate Company in Guangzhou is reported to have retrenched nearly 40 percent of its total staff, while cutting the salaries of the remaining ones by up to 30 percent.
"In the past, we were used to fat year-end bonuses and other rewards," said a salesperson with a Bejing-based high-end property developer. "This year, we are worrying about our jobs."
Despite reassurances from top management, the staff morale at Vantone, a leading Chinese property developer, has been depressed by the layoffs in units involved in different development projects. "We aren't sure how many (people) have gone," a source in the company said. "I don't know when it will be me."
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, real estate investment growth slowed to 22.7 percent in the first 11 months of 2008, down from 31.8 percent in a year earlier period.
The China Real Estate Index Academy forecasts that the real estate investment growth will slow further in 2009. It said that many large real-estate companies have remained confident in the long term. But short-term uncertainties have forced many to trim their investment plans.
China to promote graduates' employment
January 9th, 2009BEIJING - The State Council, or cabinet, pledged on Wednesday to give top priority to the employment of university graduates, reflecting the spread of the global financial crisis and the "austere" job situation.
Premier Wen Jiabao presided over a cabinet meeting on the issue of employment of university graduates. The meeting called these graduates China's "valuable human resources".
The council decided to adopt more measures to promote the employment of university graduates.
Subsidies and social insurance will be offered to graduates who work in villages and communities, and the government will help those who work in remote areas or join the Army to repay student loans, the meeting decided.
The government is encouraging graduates to work for small or private companies, the meeting said, noting that incentives will be given to companies that employ these graduates. It also urged large companies to hire more university graduates.
Graduates are encouraged to start businesses, with favorable tax and loan policies, the meeting said.
It also ordered universities to improve their job placement services, by providing free information and helping graduates find jobs.
The meeting also decided to set up and improve a mechanism to assist university graduates from poor families.
According to published reports, China had nearly 5.6 million university graduates in 2008, and this year, the figure is expected to top 6 million.
China vows to boost employment in 2009
January 8th, 2009Amid waves of job cuts worldwide, China has embarked on active measures to minimize job cuts and has pledged to boost employment this year.
The financial crisis continues to hurt the fourth largest economy and pushed many enterprises to cut their headcounts.
The following provinces are among the many in the country that have striven to stabilize their job markets.
South China's Yangtze River Delta, a major manufacturing center, has been hit unexpectedly hard. Job vacancies in the manufacturing sector stood at 41.43 percent of the total in the eastern Zhejiang province in the third quarter, a record low in recent years.
The same situation occurred to manufacturers in the eastern Jiangsu province with job vacancies in the sector accounting for 50.15 percent of the total, down 0.94 percent over the same period last year, and down 4.16 percent from the second quarter.
To cushion the regions from the effects of the global crisis, the Yangtze Delta has set up an early warning system to conduct monitoring of the job situation. At present, six cities including Nanjing, Hangzhou and Ningbo are the trial areas.
The system is designed for regional labor and social security offices to collect employment information, such as the possible job cuts and the planned new recruits in the following week and the actual cuts.
Zhejiang province will do this in 11 cities this year.
At the end of November, Zhejiang also cut back enterprises' payments of social security funds for employees to mitigate their burden.
Another focus of most cities in the region is to encourage people to start businesses. Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces pledge to kick in favorable measures including free skill training for laid-off workers.
Officials and experts said the region expects a tougher job picture in the first quarter of this year as the global financial turmoil continued to spread.
Shanghai has launched programs to provide graduates and migrant workers with subsidies for skill training. On Dec 30, 2008, the first employment service base was set up in Shanghai for graduates to gain internship experiences.
The Shanghai government also encouraged business start-ups to increase jobs. The city pledged to limit the registered unemployment rate to below 4.5 percent.
Hong Kong posted its registered unemployment rate at 3.8 percent between September to November, up from 3.5 percent between August and October, an extra 4,600 jobless.
Donald Tsang Yam-kuen, chief executive of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, said the current government work aimed at guaranteeing stability of job markets.
In early December last year, the Hong Kong government took a series of steps to create more than 60,000 posts in 2009. For example, the spending on infrastructure would be raised to about HK$40 billion, which would provide 55,000 jobs, 12,000 more than last year. The government would also add 7,700 public servant jobs.
Call for more overseas talents
January 7th, 2009More effort should be made to attract outstanding overseas talents to work in China, the Ministry of Education said yesterday.
"High-level talents with overseas education and work experience will greatly strengthen China's all-round development, especially as the country is implementing its strategy of invigorating the nation through science, technology and education," Lu Yugang, director of the ministry's talent development office, told China Daily.
The ministry, with the help of other ministries, has increased its financial support for overseas talents and simplified the approval procedure to help them gain "citizen treatment" in China aiming at attracting a group of leading scholars in certain disciplines across the world and forming a group of excellent innovation organizations in China, Lu said.
The ministry has been conducting some exemplary programs to attract scholars to China, he said.
The Chunhui (Spring Bud) Program is one of the programs targeting scholars with doctoral degrees and outstanding records, he said.
Launched in 1996, the program has already funded more than 12,000 individuals and 200 groups of scholars and researchers to serve the country on short-term visits.
Science and Technology Minister Wan Gang is a beneficiary of the program.
Wan was a member of a German automobile research team that got financial support from the program in the late 1990s. He returned to China to work in 2000 and became the president of Tongji University in Shanghai in 2004.
Another of the ministry's programs - the Changjiang Scholars Program, which was set up in 1998 in association with the Hong Kong-based Li Ka-Shing Foundation - has provided financial support to 1,308 leading scholars to devote themselves to the construction of key subjects and academic teams in 115 colleges across China.
The scholars each get a 100,000 yuan ($14,615) annual allowance, research funds and good working conditions provided by the universities.
The Changjiang program has increased the number of scholars to 100 a year since 2004 from 10 in the previous years, and last year began awarding 1-million yuan grants to its top 5 scholars.
More than 98 of the scholars have PhDs and 367 were of foreign nationality, though mostly ethnic Chinese, statistics showed.
Peking University has introduced famous math professor Tian Gang from Princeton University in the United States, while Tsinghua University introduced biological professor Shi Yigong from the same university.
Rao Zihe, 58, president of Nankai University in Tianjin returned to China to work in 1996 after 10 years overseas.
"I gave up my research work at Oxford University and came back to China, attracted by the promising outlook of my motherland and good offers by universities," he said.
More job losses may surface for urban workers in 2009
January 6th, 2009BEIJING, Jan. 3 (Xinhua) -- Cai Fang, a renowned labor expert in China, warns the country may see more job losses among urban workers in 2009 after millions of migrant workers became unemployed last year.
The majority of job losses in 2008 were mainly reported among migrant workers, Cai, head of the Population and Labor Economy Institute under the Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS), wrote in an article published in Caijing Magazine in December.
Migrant workers, who often work in factories, are among the first to bear the brunt of the current global financial crisis. Statistics from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security showed 10 million of China's total 130 million migrant workers went back to their rural hometowns jobless last year after some exporters were forced to shut down or halt production to avoid losses as a result of decreased overseas demand.
As a result, the income of rural and urban residents could grow at a slower pace, Cai said. The deceleration of income growth would definitely hurt consumption, he added.
Weak domestic consumption would further slow the country's economic growth. In addition, the other two growth engines -- export and investment -- are also not doing well, Cai said.
This could lead to more job losses across the country, he added.
"In the end, there could be a noted increase in the unemployment rate for 2009."
The government has already taken actions to promote exports, investment and consumption in order to boost the economy.
Measures so far include a four-trillion-yuan stimulus package, raising export rebates to benefit exporters and tapping the vast rural market with more government subsidies for farmers to buy home appliances, among others.
Cai also said the unemployment rate compiled by the government would not rise markedly in 2008 because rural laborers are not counted in the figure.
The unemployment rate was 4 percent for the January-October period in 2008. The unemployment rate in 2007 was also 4 percent.
Overseas Chinese eye motherland for jobs
January 5th, 2009They were the "gold-collar" workers: highly educated Chinese people working on Wall Street. Now, they are known as "sea turtles" as they head home to escape the financial storm.
Nearly 1,000 would-be turtles in business suits packed the ballroom of a New York hotel on December 13, where they pitched themselves at a job fair for opportunities in Shanghai, China's financial hub.
Among them was Dong Shaw, who has worked on Wall Street for the last eight years after doing a PhD at Columbia University, and now uses an anglicized form of his last name.
"The crisis in the US is very severe. We're having a serious shock that will reshape the landscape of Wall Street," says Shaw, who is looking for jobs that match his expertise in model-driven stock selection.
Shaw, who said he was in his 40s, currently does stock-picking at a hedge fund and has also worked at Scudder Investments, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.
Like many at the fair, Shaw is attracted to China's relatively unscathed financial sector and still healthy growth prospects.
"As a new market, China is full of opportunities," the Shanghai native told reporters.
The worst financial crisis in decades has left the US economy mired in a recession since December 2007, claiming more than 2 million jobs so far. New York's securities industry has lost 16,000 jobs and could lose a total of 38,000 by next October, while another 10,000 could be axed in related fields such as banking, according to New York's state comptroller.
Some cities and firms in China are quick to exploit the opportunity to lure back native talent. The fair was led by the Shanghai municipal government and organized by about two dozen banks, insurers and securities firms from the city, including the Shanghai Stock Exchange, one of the two stock exchanges in the Chinese mainland.
New York was the last stop in the delegation's efforts to poach back up to as many as 170 seasoned specialists in such fields as risk management and private wealth management. Its two earlier recruiting sessions in London and Chicago attracted a total of 1,200 people.
Earlier this month, Nanjing in Jiangsu province in East China held similar events in several major cities in the US, which attracted hundreds of people.
Eager to become a major player in the world economy, China is working hard to expand its talent pool and overseas Chinese, who offer both international experience and language and cultural skills, have often become an ideal option for local firms.
Of the 1.2 million Chinese people who have gone abroad to study in the past 30 years, only one fourth of them have returned, according to the Chinese government.
It's been a tough year for many of the "gold-collar" Chinese on Wall Street. Some have lost their jobs and most have seen their personal wealth shrink.
"This is an unusual time. For some, this is their first experience of being unemployed and they're under enormous pressure," says Tony Tang, president of The Chinese Finance Association (TCFA), a nonprofit group based in New York.
"Now these Chinese companies are giving out positions and many are contemplating it."
Optimism over China
To be sure, the Chinese economy is also hitting a bump this year as export demand evaporates in response to the global economic slowdown. Sagging asset values are another cause of concern, with the local stock market down about 70 percent this year, one of the worst performers in the world.
Beijing recently unveiled another round of stimulus measures including increasing money supply by 17 percent to boost lending and consumption. It comes on the heels of a 4 trillion yuan package announced last month amid fears growth could fall below the 8 percent considered necessary to create enough jobs.
Indeed, so many sea turtles (hai gui in Mandarin) have returned home that the people of Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere have invented a new name for those returnees who cannot find a job: "seaweed" (hai dai).
But, while unemployment is rising in China, there are still opportunities at the top of the labor market, especially for those with foreign education and experience.
Zack Liu, who returned to China in earlier 2008 after more than a decade on Wall Street, says he was impressed by the efforts made by Chinese fund firms to institutionalize and professionalize the industry.
Liu started his career in finance in 1996 at Bear Stearns after earning an MBA from Cornell and a PhD degree in physics from Florida State University. Over the past year, he has watched two of the three firms he worked for either collapse or merge with others as a result of the credit crunch.
"It's sad to watch all these big banks fail. Life is like a roller-coaster. I made the right decision at the right time to come back to China," Liu tells reporters by phone from his new home in Shenzhen.
Patriotism is sometimes a factor, but economic interest is certainly a much more important consideration. Still, many "sea turtles" acknowledged that they're willing to accept lower pay if the job provides attractive career prospects.
Career International, a leading recruitment firm in Beijing, says there has been a jump in interest from Chinese employees on Wall Street. Their potential employers in China, according to the company, mostly offer a base pay in the range of $100,000 to $500,000.
"Before the crisis, we were receiving about five resumes per week on average. Now, it's two or three times of that," Jun Xu, director of the firm's financial services group, says by telephone from Beijing.
"We're also trying to help their families through the transition. Unlike us (who only have one child), many 'sea turtles' have two or three kids and some also need a bilingual daycare center."
Some in the United States, such as Ke Zhang, who works for a hedge fund after being laid off from Lehman Brothers earlier this year, are taking a wait-and-see attitude.
"The economy here is terrible," says the 27-year-old who holds a masters degree from Columbia University. "Gaining experience in the US is still very important. Besides, the employment situation in China is far from rosy either."
Union to help migrants get pay on time
December 31st, 2008The All-China Federation of Trade Unions said yesterday it will help ensure migrant workers receive their salaries on time, as Spring Festival - traditionally, the peak season for delayed payments - is fast approaching.
Federation chairman Wang Zhaoguo said unemployment among migrant workers has become one of the biggest problems caused by the global recession.
"Because migrant workers still receive their salaries late sometimes, we should work harder to tackle this problem," he said.
The federation's vice-chairman Sun Chunlan said the global recession might drive more migrant workers to return home next year, so the federation should do more to protect their interests and help them become reemployed.
The federation has 210 million members, 65 million of whom are migrant workers. China is home to 230 million migrant workers, federation figures showed.
In October, five rural migrant workers hurled bricks onto the streets from atop a 32-story building in Zhengzhou, Henan province, in hopes of arousing public attention to help them win wage arrears. They were charged with disrupting social order and were brought before a local court on Dec 2. The court has yet to issue a ruling, Dahe Daily's website reported.
"We should bring more migrant workers into trade unions, ensure they receive their pay every month and offer guidance to help them start businesses or become reemployed," Sun said.
Tong Zhihui, a professor at the school of agricultural economics and rural development at Renmin University of China, said a high percentage of migrant workers have joined trade unions. The tricky part is helping unions reach their potential, Tong said.
"Most migrant workers tend to find lawyers or directly appeal to the law when employers violate their rights. It would save time and money if trade unions could fulfill this role," he said.
Sun said more trade unions should be founded in towns and villages, so migrant workers could also find support after returning home.
Xie Guiji, a migrant worker who recently returned to his hometown in Sichuan province, said he had not yet joined a union.
"I am just doing odd jobs now. I get my pay every day after work but still do not know where to go if someone refuses to pay me on time," Xie said.
"Before, I did not know we had trade unions in our county. Now that I know they can protect me, I will apply to one after the New Year."
China aims to create 9m jobs in urban areas in 2009
December 30th, 2008Human Resources and Social Security Minister Yin Weimin said in Beijing on Monday that China aims to create 9 million new jobs in urban districts next year.
Yin said China wants to keep the registered urban unemployment rate under 4.6 percent next year.
"The economic slowdown due to the financial crisis will add difficulties for Chinese seeking employment. The job situation in China is grim, so effective measures must be taken to help new graduates, migrant workers or other groups, he said.
The urban unemployment rate in the past five years was below 4.3 percent, but this year's target was set at 4.5 percent because of the severe employment situation.
The government was trying to reduce the burdens of employers by such methods as deferring payment of social security funds.
Unemployed migrant workers who return home are being encouraged to start businesses. They will get credit extensions, tax breaks, business registration and information consulting service, according to the country's central rural work conference, which concluded on Sunday.
Ministry of Agriculture figures from 10 provinces and municipalities show that about 7.8 million migrant laborers had returned home earlier than in previous years for the Spring Festival.
Most multinationals set up labor unions in China
December 26th, 2008Most multinationals, including those on the Fortune 500 list, have set up labor unions on the Chinese mainland, a senior unionist said Wednesday.
According to Guo Wencai, organization department director of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, 313 labor unions have been set up by 83 percent of headquarters of multinationals in China.
About 3,843 of their corporate entities across the Chinese mainland, or 85 percent, have established trade unions so far with nearly 2.13 million union members, he said.
In provinces like Hebei, Hubei and Liaoning, more than 95 percent of multinational entities have been unionized.
Guo said China has made important progress in persuading the unionization of multinationals in this country but there are still some multinationals' headquarters and entities which fail to set up labor unions, including US Microsoft, Wyeth Pharmaceutical, Morgan Stanley and Japanese Marubeni Cooperation.
China has the highest number of trade union members in the world, with membership increasing from 123 million in 2003 to 209 million by June this year.
Outbound workers urged to pick employers carefully
December 25th, 2008The Ministry of Commerce on Tuesday urged workers headed for jobs overseas to select employers with care amid the global financial and economic crisis.
The crisis has affected some foreign employers' ability to pay, and overseas workers often become the victims, said an official.
Workers should carefully verify prospective employers' information, said the official.
Recently, about 200 construction workers who went to Romania for jobs told the Chinese embassy about problems including defaults on wages.
China's outbound labor generated revenue of $7.24 billion from January to November, up 24.2 percent. At the end of November, there were 794,000 Chinese workers working abroad, up 51,000 over a year earlier.
Jobseekers get frustrated as employment situation worsens
December 24th, 2008A sense of uncertainty is growing among jobseekers as the country faces a worsening employment situation, experts said on Friday.
"There is a strong sense of insecurity among migrant workers, college graduates and even white-collar workers amid the global financial crisis," Guo Weiqing, a professor of public administration at Guangzhou's Sun Yat-sen University, told China Daily.
Tens of thousands of migrant workers have lost their jobs in Guangdong province with the closure of factories hit by the crisis.
"It's like an epidemic and everyone is now worried about their jobs," Guo said.
According to the latest survey from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security this week, 4.85 million jobless migrant workers had returned to their hometowns by the end of November, and nationwide, more than 10 million of migrants are currently out of work.
Around 670,000 small firms have closed this year as a result of the global financial crisis, adding to employment pressures, State Council advisor Chen Quansheng told a forum in Beijing on Friday.
About 6.7 million jobs vanished, many in the export hub of Guangdong, pushing unemployment well above the official figure of 8.3 million, Chen said.
"The real figure is much higher than the official statistics, which only report urban registered jobless," he said.
"The major problem in China now is employment, especially for university graduates and young migrant workers," Chen said.
An increasing number of graduates will face a more difficult situation next year. The unemployment rate for new graduates is over 12 percent and 1.5 million of them will be without a job by the end of this year, while 6.1 million more will enter the job market next year, a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences report said.
"Facing such a tough time, young migrant workers and students can easily get emotional or hotheaded and may become a potential threat to social stability," Guo warned.
Li Wei, a CASS researcher on social development, suggested that more social security measures should be introduced to ensure the basic living standards of the jobless.
He also said the NGOs can play a more active role in social relief and vocational training programs.
Training program to create 100,000 jobs
December 23rd, 2008LUPA (Leadership of Open Source University Promotion Alliance), a Chinese open source software community, plans to initiate a training project for the country's computer and software graduates as low-cost open source software development is gaining popularity in the current financial crisis.
The project, which is scheduled to start next February, will provide 100,000 job opportunities for computer and software graduates nationwide, said Zhang Jianhua, chairman of LUPA.
Under the program, college graduates will receive training on open source technologies for 3 to 6 months, which will cost less than 100 yuan ($14.60). If they pass the government-organized examinations, they will get a transitional position in enterprises in development zones where they will receive further training under the guidance of skilled employees.
"Graduates will get salaries which are relatively lower than official employees. The money will come from the government, social funds and enterprises, but details are still under discussion," Zhang said.
After the transitional stage, graduates can choose to stay or find new jobs elsewhere or even to start their own business.
The graduates will mainly come from the 100 member universities and colleges of LUPA such as Tsinghua University and Peking University.
Currently, more than 30 State-level hi-tech development zones where software firms are clustered, have participated in the project and the figure is expected to reach 54 next February.
According to the 2009 blue book of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, one million college graduates are likely to fail to find jobs by the end of 2008. Besides, about 5.92 million new graduates will enter the job-hunting market in 2009.
"The financial crisis is exerting great pressure on college graduates who are looking for jobs," said Zhang. "However, opportunities are emerging for computer and software major graduates because open source software is becoming more popular for their low cost, especially among small and medium-sized enterprises."
According to Gartner, an information technology research and advisory firm, open source software has been applied in 85 percent of enterprises worldwide.
In the next 12 months, it will grow to cover all enterprises and by around 2012, open source technology will be adopted in 80 percent of commercial software.
"The project is especially well-received in vocational colleges," said Zhang. More than 300,000 graduates have registered for the project so far, he said.
Call for law to punish fleeing bosses
December 22nd, 2008The National People's Congress (NPC) should introduce a new legislation that makes it a crime for business owners to flee without paying workers, a senior Guangdong official said on Tuesday.
Liu Youjun, deputy director of the provincial labor and social security department, said his proposal will be officially submitted to the NPC at next year's session.
In Dongguan, a major manufacturing base in Guangdong, 117 firms closed down in September and October.
In each case, the owners fled, leaving more than 20,000 people without wages, the Hong Kong-based Takungpao reported yesterday.
Local governments and taxpayers were left to pick up the bill, it said.
There is currently no criminal law covering this sort of behavior, Liu said.
Labor and social security departments can issue administrative punishments to business owners, such as preventing them from investing in the future, but they are not enough to stop unscrupulous operators from re-offending, he said.
The only effective solution is to introduce a law that makes it a crime for company bosses to flee their failing businesses, he said.
Meanwhile, Liu Bingquan, director of Guangdong's small and medium enterprise bureau, told NPC deputies on a visit to Guangzhou yesterday that in the first 10 months of the year, 15,661 local SMEs either closed down, suspended their operations or moved away.
In some parts of Guangzhou, local government teams have even been set up to monitor suspect firms to ensure their owners do not flee, he said.
However, not all company chiefs are on the verge of fleeing.
Harley Seyedin, president of the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in South China, told China Daily: "Multinational firms don't behave like that.
"They want to expand their businesses in China, and many will be hiring more people next year."
A recent study conducted by AmCham found that most of its 1,300 member companies in South China had decided to shift the focus of their business from America and Europe to China.
"The Chinese market is getting stronger compared with the Western market," Seyedin said.
"So firms are hiring more people, rather than laying them off."
Shanghai recruitment fairs hot on Wall Street
December 19th, 2008A number of Shanghai financial institutions hunting overseas to recruit high-end talent recently came back with their bags packed with resumes.
From Dec 5 to Dec 13, the Shanghai team held a series of recruitment fairs in the US and Britain, which lured thousands of local talents.
"The recruitment is quite hot. For a five minute interview, some applicants even take planes or drive more than 10 hours to attend the fairs," said a manager with a Shanghai-based financial institution.
According to statistics, more than 1,000 people attended the recruitment fair in New York, 300 joined the fair in London, and 200 visited the fair held in Chicago. People who attend the fairs were laid-off workers, those who worried about losing their jobs and prepared in advance, and several graduates.
"Some applicants have been the senior managers of financial institutions with more than 10 years, even 20 years, of work experience. It's a pity to see them standing in a queue to wait for a time-limited interview," the manager said.
Shanghai overseas recruitment offers about 170 high-end posts related to banking, funds, insurance and securities investment, including chief economists for financial institutions, senior managers charging financial derivatives and senior managers responsible for market risks. The annual salaries range from 100,000 yuan ($14,600) to 1.5 million yuan.
Most jobs require applicants with more than five years of work experience in multinational financial institutions, and a master's degree. Furthermore, some posts only recruit people with doctorate degrees and prefer to employ those with professional certificates, such as a CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst), an ACCA (Association of Chartered Certified Accountants), and a CFP (Certified Financial Planner).
For the posts related to risk management, the requirement is even higher. Applicants must have 5 years of work experience in financial institutions and 10 years in strategic research.
Public concern over jobs, pay gap
December 17th, 2008Rising unemployment and a widening income gap are the two issues of most concern to Chinese people, an annual report released on Monday by the Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS) said.
Graduates from the Shandong Institute of Light Industry learn flower arranging at a florist's in Jinan, Shandong province on Monday. The bleak employment situation has forced many graduates to consider setting up their own businesses. [Xinhua]
The document, entitled The Analysis of and Forecasts for Social Development (or the Blue Book on Chinese Society), said 38.4 percent of the 7,000 families interviewed had been affected by the unstable employment situation.
The figure is 8.4 percentage points higher than in 2006.
In urban areas, the unemployment rate is now 9.4 percent, twice the registered rate of 4.5 percent released by the Human Resources and Society Security Ministry, the report said.
Central and western parts of the country, which have less-developed economies, are facing a more severe unemployment situation than wealthy coastal areas, while big cities have a higher unemployment rate than small towns, it said.
Natural disasters and rising operational costs due to the global economic slowdown have caused thousands of small and medium-sized labor-intensive firms to close down this year, leaving millions of migrant workers jobless, the report said.
"The global financial crisis has had a profound effect on the Chinese economy and society," Li Peilin, director of the CASS Institute of Sociology, said at a ceremony to release the report.
"The effects may go beyond our expectations and we have no clear idea how they will change society," he said.
The report also said that the number of people graduating from college rose to a new high of 5.6 million this year. But as of August, just 70 percent of them had found work, it said.
By the end of the year, more than 1.5 million fresh graduates will be without a job, while 6.1 million others will enter the jobs market next year, it said.
"The unemployment rate for new graduates is over 12 percent, three times the urban registered unemployment rate," Chen Guangjin, a professor with the Institute of Sociology, said.
"We should pay more attention to the problem," he said.
Sociologists have also warned that the widening income gap between rich and poor will restrict the consumption power of middle and low-income families, especially during the economic recession.
The average income of 20 percent of the richest families is 17 times higher than that of 20 percent of the poorest ones, the report said.
The rich also own far more durable home appliances, such as refrigerators, mobile phones and computers, it said.
Just 4 percent of poor families have a computer, compared with 66 of rich families, it said.
"It is very important to improve the income situation in China in order to boost domestic demand," Li Wei, a CASS researcher and one of the writers of the report, said.
Overseas Chinese return home to seek jobs
December 15th, 2008An increasing number of overseas-educated Chinese are returning home in search of jobs after graduation.
According to the Ministry of Education, more than 50,000 Chinese students will come back to the country this year, up from 25,000 in 2004.
The World Journal, a Chinese newspaper based in the United States, reported in late November, more overseas-educated Chinese were trying to find jobs back in China, as unemployment rates in other countries increased during the global financial crisis.
A senior state leader said Tuesday the Party and government will try its best to create a favorable working and living environment for them.
"When faced with the tough task of reform and development and fierce international competition in science and technology development, talent is the most important resource we must have," said Jia Qinglin, chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), at the first meeting of a newly elected council of the Western Returned Scholars Association (WRSA) and Chinese Overseas-Educated Scholars Association.
In the past three decades since China's economic reform and opening-up, an increasing number of Chinese, receiving higher educations abroad, have come back and contributed a lot to the country's modernization, Jia said.
He said he expected them to also contribute to helping the nation survive international financial turmoil and to maintain moderate economic growth and social stability.
The WRSA, founded in 1913, has 13 branches across the world with more than 11,000 members.
It should play a better role as a bridge among overseas-educated scholars and the government, Jia said.
Labor arbitration cases soaring in Guangzhou
December 12th, 2008GUANGZHOU - High numbers of company closures and large-scale redundancies have led to a surge in labor arbitration cases in Guangzhou, a senior official said on Monday.
Xie Yingjian, director of the arbitration office of the Guangzhou labor and social security bureau, said that by the end of last month, more than 60,000 applications had been made for arbitration this year.
The figure is about the same as the combined total for the previous two years, he said.
"There has been a sharp increase in the number of cases since May," he said.
"About 60 percent of them are claims for back pay, with most of the rest being appeals for compensation from people who have been made redundant."
In the past few months, the number of applications has been at least double the total for the same period of last year, he said.
"The global economic crisis has led to the closure of many firms, especially labor-intensive ones, and pushed dozens of others to the brink of bankruptcy. Downsizing and lay offs were inevitable," Xie said.
"Also, because arbitration services are now provided free of charge, more people are pursuing labor disputes."
Labor arbitration became a free service across the country on May 1, with the implementation of the labor dispute intermediation law.
Because of the massive increase in demand for arbitration services, Guangzhou currently has a backlog of more than 9,600 cases, some of which might not be completely settled until next September, Xie said.
Peng Peng, a researcher with the Guangzhou Academy of Social Sciences, said it is no surprise to see labor authorities struggling to cope with the heavy workload.
"Guangdong handles about 25 percent of all labor disputes in China each year, yet the province is home to less than 7 percent of the country's arbitrators," he said.
"It's hardly surprising that they have been struggling to cope since the service became free."
Both trade unions and the government should play an active role in trying to prevent problems from escalating into full-scale labor disputes, Peng said.
"If arbitration is necessary, however, the process should be simplified," he said.
"Under the current economic circumstances, the number of labor disputes is likely to keep rising next year, but people who have been made redundant can't afford to wait around for arbitration," he said.
Jobless rate should be kept below 5% for stability
December 11th, 2008Social stability could be threatened if the registered urban unemployment rate rises above 5 percent next year, a senior lawmaker warned on Tuesday.
Zheng Gongcheng, a member of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, told China Daily the jobless rate could rise next year from the current 4 percent because of massive job cuts.
His remarks come as policymakers are holding a three-day Central Economic Work Conference to discuss measures to create new jobs and keep the present unemployment level in the face of the global financial crisis.
"If the government can keep the registered urban jobless rate around 4.5 percent, everything would be okay," said Zheng, also a leading scholar in social security at Renmin University of China.
But if the rate - which excludes migrant workers - rises above 5 percent, "it will lead to a series of negative consequences". The number of poor urban residents will increase and living conditions in cities will be compromised, he said.
In such a situation, local governments would be prompted to hire more urban residents instead of migrant workers to keep the jobless rate low. It would leave millions of migrant workers without jobs and force them to return to the countryside.
That is the "last thing we want to see", he said, because a drastic increase in the number of jobless migrant workers could pose a threat to social stability.
The job market in the labor-intensive exports sector shrank in the third quarter of this year because falling overseas demand has forced the closure of many factories.
The job market will reach a two-year low in the first quarter of next year as the global financial crisis takes its toll, according to a survey released on Tuesday.
Conducted by Manpower Inc, a leading global employment services provider, the survey shows the intention of employers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou for new recruits is the weakest.
"The global economic downturn and decline in exports have made employers more cautious about hiring new staff," said Lucille Wu, managing director of Manpower Greater China.
Late last month, Zhang Xiaojian, vice-minister of human resources and social security said the government would be able to keep the urban registered unemployment rate below 4.5 percent this year, but the figure could rise in 2009.
The ministry, which said 24 million people would be competing for 12 million jobs next year, has submitted a job stimulus package to the State Council, or the country's Cabinet, for approval.
The highlight of the package is the introduction of a special nationwide vocational training program, especially for laid-off and migrant workers, to help ease the pressure on the job market.
Local governments will provide most of the finance for the package by making full use of special employment and unemployment insurance funds, sources said.
"The unemployment insurance fund has topped 100 billion yuan ($14.5 billion), and it's high time it is used," Zheng said.
The country has more than 230 million migrant workers, with about half of them working away from their provinces. About 60 to 70 percent of them are below 28 and lack basic agricultural skills, Zheng said.
"The social trend shows more and more surplus laborers will migrate from rural areas to cities and become industrial workers. We should not drive them back to the countryside," he said.
Growth for jobs high on agenda
December 10th, 2008Top policymarkers will convene today to discuss how to grapple with the challenge of ensuring at least 8 percent economic growth next year while at the same time pushing forward with the nation's economic restructuring, economists have said.
The annual Central Economic Work Conference, to be held from today to Wednesday in Beijing, will set the tone for next year's economic policy. The three-day event is expected to shed more light on how the government will use fiscal and monetary measures to bolster employment and domestic demand, while reducing excessive dependence on exports.
"The meeting will detail measures for achieving at least 8 percent growth in 2009, the minimum required to keep the unemployment situation under control," said Song Hong, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Song was one of the two economists who attended a Nov 28 meeting with top Party officials to discuss economic priorities for 2009.
The nation's economic growth dropped to 9 percent in the third quarter, compared with 11.4 percent for 2007. The global economic slowdown may even drag down China's growth to 7.5 percent in 2009, the lowest in two decades, the World Bank forecast earlier.
Such growth, considered high for many economies, is however not deemed enough for a nation that needs to churn out 10 million jobs for fresh job seekers each year. Over the past months, a number of factories in the costal export bases have closed down, leading to the layoffs of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers.
The bleak situation has led the government to unveil a host of measures such as a $586-billion stimulus package and hefty cuts in interest rates to jack up domestic demand.
Analysts said the government may elaborate at the conference on how it plans to finance the massive stimulus package, which is critical to make up for declining foreign demand.
Zhang Ping, minister of the National Development and Reform Commission, said earlier that the package could bolster annual GDP growth by 1 percentage point by 2010. Previous statistics show 1 percentage point in GDP growth could create about 1 million jobs.
"Policymakers may put forward further fiscal and monetary stimulus measures," Song said. "The $586 billion package may prove insufficient, given the worsening world economy."
It was reported earlier that policymakers would also discuss raising the threshold of personal income tax from 2,000 yuan to 3,000 yuan a month. The move, combined with tax cuts already announced for local businesses, is expected to boost domestic consumption and corporate investment.
Some analysts also expect the yuan to start to depreciate after the conference, which could benefit the nation's struggling exporters.
While most analysts are looking at the conference for more pro-growth measures, some say policymakers will also reiterate the message that they have no intention of delaying the transformation of the country's development pattern.
"The current crisis could be an opportunity to reduce the economy's excessive reliance on exports," Zhao Tao, deputy secretary-general of the Policy Research Office of the CPC Central Committee, wrote in commentary published on Saturday in Outlook Weekly, a publication of the Xinhua News Agency.
According to Zhao, the nation's polices will be directed at boosting domestic demand, consumption in particular, rather than low-end manufacturing for exports.
And the nation will strive to reduce its dependence on foreign trade, as a share of GDP, from 60 percent last year to 40 percent by 2020 and eventually to less than 25 percent.
The government will also unveil more measures to encourage consumption, which should account for about 75-80 percent of the GDP by 2020, Zhang said.
Final consumption, which includes household and community spending, now makes up about a half of the nation's economy, compared with an average of 70 percent in developing countries and 80 percent in developed economies. This forces China to rely heavily on foreign demand, which also makes it vulnerable to economic downturns abroad.
"Policymakers should make clear that growth should not come at the expense of a delay of the nation's economic restructuring," said Zhang Xiaojing, an economist with the CASS, the country's top think tank. "Or we risk repeating today's plight in a few years."
Food firm hires top students
December 9th, 2008GUANGZHOU - Sun Xiaogang is more familiar with studying the works of famous Chinese writers such as Lu Xun, but now he is swotting up on how to make the best cuts of pork.
Chen Sheng, chairman of Guangdong Tiandi Food Group, gives postgraduates tips on how to sell pork on Thursday in Guangzhou, Guangdong province. [China Daily]
Sun was one of 35 postgraduates hired by Guangdong Tiandi Food Group who worked in markets throughout the city.
The postgraduate student majoring in Chinese literature at Guangzhou's Sun Yat-sen University, will graduate from the school in the summer of next year.
"We do not have specific requirements regarding what they learn, but our one requirement is that all applicants are postgraduates," a manager at the company surnamed Lin told China Daily.
To win the post, Sun sold pork in the market for three days.
The 35 successful applicants signed agreements with the company on Thursday, meaning that they can formally start working as soon as they complete their studies.
After they start work, they still need to sell pork in markets for at least two months, Lin said.
"This is training for all of our new employees," she said.
After the two months, they will be appointed to managerial posts, earning between 80,000 yuan ($12,000) and 100,000 yuan a year, she said.
"The job market is very tough this year. Among all of the students of the Chinese literature postgraduate department at our school, I am the first one to get a job," Sun said.
In contrast, most of last year's batch of postgraduates had no problem finding jobs, he said.
Sun said he did not mind having to work in the market as a pork seller, given the current poor state of the job market. In addition, the firm has offered him a great opportunity, he said.
Li Xiaolu, director of Guangdong education department last month warned students who are going to graduate from college and graduate school next year that the job market they will face will be the toughest in three decades.
He encouraged students not to set their sights too high, adding that working in less-developed areas or setting up their own businesses were two options open to them.
Zhejiang on recruitment drive
December 8th, 2008While Shanghai tries to lure top overseas professionals, representatives of 247 companies in Zhejiang will be visiting the city to attract some its workers to the province.
Zhejiang is offering more than 5,000 jobs at a fair to be held in Shanghai on Saturday.
The province is seeking managers, administrative directors, executive vice-presidents and vice-presidents.
"There are 50 to 60 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) from Wenzhou participating at this job fair, with several hundred positions available," Zhou Dewen, chairman of the Wenzhou SMEs development promotion federation, said yesterday.
"Wenzhou is keen on attracting professionals from Shanghai," Zhou said.
He said it is part of an overall plan to attract 600,000 mid- to high-level professionals.
"Although many SMEs have been hit by a drop in overseas orders due to the current financial crisis, it is still of vital importance to recruit and retain good people," Zhou said.
Zhejiang is offering a number of perks in its recruit drive - granting of residential status, subsidized education for children, and spouse employment. "We are offering a salary package 10 to 15 percent higher than anywhere else in China," Zhou said.
The Shanghai University of Finance & Economics (SUFE) has urged its students to attend the job fair.
Ruan Shan, a second-year SUFE student majoring in tourism management, said that her schoolmates, mostly finance majors, are suffering greatly from the global financial crisis.
"Even those few corporations that are continuing to recruit, have drastically cut down on numbers," she said.
Although there is still more than six months to go before graduation, Ruan and her classmates have attended many job interviews, but have received no offers.
Ruan said she will attend the job fair. "I have lowered my expectations. All I want is just a job here, so long as it pays about 3,000 yuan, ($440) after tax," she said.
Shanghai casts job net for overseas talent
December 5th, 2008Representatives of 28 financial institutions here will leave tomorrow for the United Kingdom and the United States in a bid to recruit professionals.
Organized by the Shanghai municipal bureau of human resources and social security, the institutions include banks, fund, and asset management companies. About 170 senior positions are being offered.
In the non-financial sector, more than 1,000 positions are being offered, the government said at a regular press briefing yesterday.
The municipal bureau, together with the local financial services office, will set up three recruitment booths in London, Chicago, and New York.
The booths will be open on Saturday, Tuesday and next Saturday.
"The timing is great for us given the fact that some premier foreign financial institutions are facing hardship and redundancy problems because of the global economic downturn," Chu Minwei, president of Shanghai Finance University, said. The university is also looking to recruit overseas.
It is seeking three people to fill the positions of dean, department of international securities; assistant president, academic affairs; and chief economist, international finance institution.
"We expect the overseas professionals to help extend our global academic network, and introduce more top people to our university," Chu said.
Jeanne Qian, China country manager for human resources consulting firm, Neumann Partners, said.
"It's a smart move by Chinese companies to conduct this strategic hiring given the current situation under which foreign firms are laying off staff.
"Overseas professionals have a broader global view and have more international exposure, in particular to risk management, than domestic professionals."
Ian Crawford, executive director of the British Chamber of Commerce Shanghai, said the City of London is the largest financial market in the world, and thus has a wide variety of outstanding professionals.
"Overseas professionals work in a much bigger and wider market, and therefore have the opportunity to learn more about the trading and application of sophisticated financial products," Crawford said.
However, there are stumbling blocks ahead for the talent hunters, the major ones being salaries and the cultural divide.
"The payment gap will still be there, although we will offer attractive salary packages for ideal candidates. We will offer an annual salary of 500,000 yuan ($ 74,000) or above, which is much higher than the average in China," Chu said.
Crawford said Chinese financial institutions may baulk at the salary and bonus packages being offered to attract top professionals "but there is relatively little attraction for these professionals to come to Shanghai until the Chinese financial markets are significantly opened up".
Ministry urges better job guidance for graduates
December 4th, 2008The Ministry of Education has urged education departments across the country to offer better employment guidance and support to college graduates so that they can find proper jobs even in these difficult financial times.
"The grim economic situation poses an unprecedented challenge for college graduates to get a proper job. A series of new steps should be taken to broaden the job-seeking channels," the ministry said on its website yesterday.
"The education departments should hold more and larger job fairs next year to provide better communication between employers and college graduates," it said.
More than 6 million students will graduate next year and some of them have already begun seeking jobs.
Graduates who commit to work in remote and rural areas for a given period will be exempt from paying college tuition fees, the ministry said on Monday. And the government will pay off their education loans or grant them free admission to postgraduate courses.
The government will recruit over 30,000 college graduates next year to teach in rural schools in western regions.
The government adopted a plan in 2006 to send college graduates to rural schools as teachers, and will employ 100,000 graduates in villages in five years, starting from 2008.
On the Ministry of Education's suggestion, the army will absorb more college students next year, and the figure will be nearly equal to the total quota for 2006 and 2007: 16,000 and 17,000.
Other plans to help new graduates include raising the number of seats in full-time postgraduate or second-degree courses, which many Chinese college students could join to postpone their job-hunting exercise and look for better ones with a higher degree a couple of years later.
A colossal number of students graduate from China's colleges each year and their success rate in finding jobs varies.
Civil service pay reform to continue
December 3rd, 2008The government is going ahead with a nationwide reform of civil servants' pay that includes raising the salaries of officials in poorer regions, despite the ongoing financial crisis, a publicity official from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security said yesterday.
"At present, we do not have any plans to amend or postpone the scheduled reform," the official, who did not want to be named, told China Daily.
The salary reform is aimed at regulating the allowances and subsidies of the country's 8 million civil servants, by reducing such payments in affluent areas and boosting them in poorer regions. The changes rolled out in July 2006 and are expected to be completed next year.
Civil servants in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region and in Henan, Hebei and Anhui provinces already saw their allowances raised from last month, the Sichuan-based West China Metropolis Daily reported yesterday.
Henan provincial authorities received the green light from the State Council to raise the monthly salaries of their officials by 300 yuan ($44) each in mid-November, the newspaper reported.
The move was part of the national reform to regulate civil servants' pay and had nothing to do with the current financial crisis affecting economies worldwide, a Henan official said.
"We made the adjustment because our civil servants have complained about their low income for a long time," said the official, who wanted to be known by his surname Wu, with the finance department of the Henan provincial government.
"The changes have nothing to do with the financial crisis. We submitted the requisite applications last year," Wu said.
Still, other researchers said it was not the right time to continue with the salary reform.
"The timing is not good, as the global economy is in a recession and China is facing mounting economic pressure," Su Hainan, head of the Institute for Labor and Wage Studies, was quoted by The Economic Observer as saying on Sunday.
The government should step up efforts to fight corruption and lessen tax for companies instead of increasing civil servants' pay, Cao Jianhai, a researcher from the Institute of Industrial Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said yesterday.
"Increasing investment on rural education as well as rural infrastructure and agriculture are also among the government's imminent tasks," Cao said.
Report: Beijing is China's most innovative city
December 2nd, 2008BEIJING, Nov. 30 (Xinhua) -- Chinese capital of Beijing tops a nationwide city innovation list, according to a report released by the China City Development Research Institute on Sunday.
Shanghai, the business and financial center, and Shenzhen, which borders Hong Kong, ranked second and third on the list, ahead of Guangzhou, Tianjin and Chongqing.
Cheng Andong, the institute's executive director, said cities, which generate 70 percent of gross domestic product and are home to over 90 percent universities and research agencies, play a key role in building China into an innovative country.
The cities should develop more advanced technologies to help transform the growth mode and structures of the national economy, Cheng told a forum in Beijing.
Officials and scholars at the forum also called to introduce more innovative government management patterns and build more responsible and low-lost governments.
Govt jobs best bet in 'bad times'
December 1st, 2008The 775,000 candidates knew only 175 out of every 10,000 would get the chance to work in central government departments but that did not stop them from taking the national civil services exam Sunday.
Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security figures show 21 percent more candidates wrote the exam this year. The candidates, most of them graduating students, are fighting for 13,566 "gold rice bowls", or central government department posts.
A candidate shows her admit card for national civil service exam in Hefei, Anhui province November 30, 2008. About 775,000 people are competing for 13,566 government jobs this years. [Xinhua]
China Disabled Person's Federation jobs have attracted the highest number of candidates for a post: 4,723.
Candidates who pass the exam will be called for interviews and have to take a professional test before March 15, 2009. The successful ones can expect to get an offer before June, the ministry said.
"A civil service job is ideal for me. Although my current job might pay better, I want stability, more leisure time and more personal space. And all those can be got only as a civil servant," said Qian Qi, 22, who now works as an assistant in a foreign-funded company in Jiangsu province.
Yang Shiqiu, vice-minister of human resources and social security, said earlier that more candidates are competing for civil service jobs this year because of growing unemployment and the advantages such posts offer during these difficult times.
Cong Cong, a postgraduate student of Nanjing University, said: "I didn't think of beating so many candidates for a job when I applied for a position offered in the Ministry of Education. But I have to because I've submitted my resume to about 60 firms and got only 10 replies, and no offers."
November and December are the best time for candidates to get a high-end job, and half the students from Cong's department should have got offers by now. But this year, only two or three of them have been able to find a job. "Big or small, the civil services exam gives us hope," she said.
Almost 65 percent of the 5,000 people polled online recently said they would take the exam next year again if they fail this year. The survey also showed almost half of them had already written the exam once before.
"I would definitely try again if I don't get through this time," Qian said. "I'll keep on trying even if the success ratio is 1:100 or 1:1,000." Qian passed the written exam last year but could not get past the first round of interview for a job in the Ministry of Commerce.
Even if candidates fail to clear the national civil services exam, they still have the chance of passing the provincial service tests.
Sun Han, a student of Zhejiang University's law department, said: "I know the chance is slim but I will still try. I have prepared for the test for six months, and in case I fail in the national level test, I still have a chance to take a test in my hometown in Hangzhou in January for a job."
The provincial civil service test is much like the national exam but offers posts in local government departments.
The severe competition this year has made authorities tighten supervision, too. Radio management departments and police have taken steps to prevent candidates from cheating by using mobile phones or radio sets. A person found cheating will be banned from taking exams for five years.
Shanghai companies train staff amid storm
November 27th, 2008Local enterprises and trade unions are working aggressively to limit unemployment following the central government's call for domestic firms to nurture confidence in the face of the global financial crisis.
More than 200 local enterprises, mostly technology and manufacturing companies, promised recently not to lay off employees during the crisis but instead invest more in training and technological innovation.
The move, initiated by Shanghai Minhang district federation of trade unions, is designed to help local enterprises cope with the global economic turmoil and maintain stable social and economic development.
Sun Yaohui, vice-president of the trade union, said: "So far the government has introduced a series of measures to boost confidence among enterprises.
"Surely, trade unions now should unite with workers and business enterprises to overcome difficulties and strive for building a harmonious and stable society," he said.
"That can to some extent help reduce some pressure on the government."
Earlier this month, the ministry of human resources and social security urged state-owned enterprises to avoid large-scale job cuts.
The global financial crisis could worsen the already grim job market, Yin Weimin, the minister of human resources and social security, said.
Sun cited the Shanghai-based Baolima Technology Company, which produces mainly mobile phone keyboards and auto parts, as an exemple of the current fight.
Affected by the rising price of raw materials, the company foresees a sharp decrease in orders this year.
But it has still recruited more than 70 production line workers and engineers, Sun said.
Attributing its current difficulties to an irrational product mix, Baolima quickly set about redressing it.
It also launched a series of staff training programs to help improve productivity.
This year the company will send a total of 150 employees abroad for up to three months training.
One of them, Lu Peipei, a production line worker at Baolima Company, said three months of professional training makes workers much more efficient.
Chinese companies look to Wall Street for talent
November 26th, 2008Chinese recruiter Career International announced today it is preparing to go to Wall Street to find financial talent for its domestic clients, the first time for a local human resources company to directly find overseas financial expertise for Chinese enterprises.
Gao Yong, president of the Beijing-based HR company, told China Daily that this is an ideal time for businesses to recruit high-quality personnel engaged in finance, since the financial tsunami has led to laid-offs of banking and financing talents, who have greatly reduced their package expectations.
Meanwhile, unemployed Wall Street staff, with rich experience and professional skills, is eyeing huge opportunities in emerging market, like China and India.
Career International will soon put recruitment ads in the Wall Street Journal and its website and organize teams to hold job fairs in the United States to attract Wall Street talents.
Worsening financial crisis affects job market
November 25th, 2008China's human resources authorities say the worsening global financial conditions have begun to weigh on the country's job market. That's the message released at a press conference on Thursday. But officials denied rumors that there have been massive cuts in employees
According to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the employment situation for 2008 as a whole, is stable. Yin Weimin noted that one of the ministry's top concerns is the ripple effect of the global economic malaise. It has forced increasing numbers of small and medium-sized enterprises to close and caused job losses, especially after October. He said the government is taking measures to maintain employment stability.
In the first ten months, the number of new employees totaled 10.2 million, slightly more than the full-year target of 10 million. And the urban unemployment rate was 4 percent, below the government's target of about 4.5 percent for the whole year. However, the future picture might be gloomier than the current statistics indicate.
Graduates feel pains of global financial crisis
November 24th, 2008For Jin Zhenghao, this November has been the most stressful month in his 25 years of life.
A financial engineering major at Xiamen University in southeast China's Fujian Province, Jin is desperately trying to find a job before graduating in June 2009.
November is when the school gave him time to market himself to potential employers. Jin has sent resumes to nearly 30 companies, resulting in five interviews. So far, he has received no job offers.
Now, Jin is paying 2,000 yuan (US$293) a month to live in Shanghai, the country's financial hub, in hopes of securing more interviews.
"Companies either have few job vacancies or simply don't want new people," Jin told Xinhua over the phone. Only a year ago, he added, graduates like him, would end up with job offers from several well-known international or domestic financial companies before graduation.
"The situation is obviously very bad this year. The financial crisis is a major reason," said Jin. "I'm really worried."
Many financial companies, particularly international big names, have cut employees this year due to overseas problems in stock markets.
Jin is not the only one to feel the economic shockwave from the developed world. Thousands of factories which used to manufacture shoes, clothes or toys for export, have been closed or are struggling for survival as foreign orders declined.
This not only means there are more unemployed people, but also fewer opportunities for first-time job seekers.
Deputy Minister of Human Resources and Social Security Zhang Xiaojian said here on Thursday that 6.1 million college and university students will graduate in the first half of next year.
An additional four million college students who graduated in previous years have not found jobs and will also be vying for limited opportunities.
"If companies' demand for new employees drops significantly, finding a job will definitely become more difficult for college students," Zhang said.
Professor Yue Changjun, an expert on education and economy at Peking University in Beijing, told China Youth Daily that 67,000 private Chinese companies closed in the first half of this year.
According to Yue, this is a significant figure because private companies employed 34.2 percent of college graduates last year.
"How come I can't find a job?" a Peking University student, anonymously named "Rebecca ycj", asked in a message posted on the university's online forum.
The law student said she applied for jobs at several firms, state-owned enterprises, banks and even a news agency, but every time she was refused.
Research from 51job.com, a popular job-seeking website in China, showed the financial service, real estate, foreign trade and manufacturing industries were the hardest hit sectors as a result of the economic slowdown.
The number of job vacancies in financial services, for example, dropped by 12 percent in the July-November period, compared with the same period of last year.
Zhang said the government, schools and students were moving quickly to try to address the difficulties.
A total of 259 job fairs are currently underway throughout China. Nearly 30,000 enterprises, government organs and public institutions will offer more than 500,000 jobs at those fairs before November 30, said Zhang.
"The major idea is to help college graduates obtain employment information, create more job opportunities and encourage students to work in less developed geographical areas where they are welcomed," he said.
Prof. Li Daokui of Tsinghua University said because not all sectors are affected by the recession overseas, the prospect of employment isn't as dire as some people feel.
The government announced a 4 trillion yuan stimulus package to boost the economy and domestic demand.
"As long as China's economy maintains 9 percent growth, 10 million new jobs can be created every year," Li said.
Meanwhile, students are encouraged to think more creatively when applying for jobs, for example, they need to lower their salary expectations or consider working in rural instead of urban areas.
In a country with more than 1.3 billion people, college education used to be considered a guarantee for good income, a decent work place and a passport to big cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Things have changed now.
Jin said financial risk management companies and consulting firms were his first choice for work because entry-level income can be at least 7,000 yuan a month.
"Now 5,000 yuan or even lower is acceptable, as long as I work in the financial field," he said.
The financial crisis has also made government jobs an unexpected favorite among graduates.
A total of 775,000 people applied for a national examination to qualify as government servants. That's the highest number since 1994 and 130,000 people more than applied last year, said Yang Shiqiu, Deputy Minister of Human Resources and Social Security.
"Only 13,500 persons will be recruited, meaning less than two in every 100 people will succeed," he said.