GUANGZHOU, China — This city of 15
million on the Pearl River is the hub of a manufacturing region where
factories make everything from T-shirts and shoes to auto parts, tablet
computers and solar panels. Many factories are desperate for workers,
despite offering double-digit annual pay increases and improved
benefits.
Wang Zhengsong, right, viewed job
postings outside in Guangzhou. Blue-collar jobs are plentiful in China,
but many recent college grads are reluctant to pursue them.
But he will not consider applying for a full-time factory job because
Mr. Wang, as a college graduate, thinks that is beneath him. Instead,
he searches every day for an office job, which would initially pay as
little as a third of factory wages.
“I have never and will never consider a factory job — what’s the
point of sitting there hour after hour, doing repetitive work?” he
asked.
Millions of recent college graduates in China like Mr. Wang are
asking the same question. A result is an anomaly: Jobs go begging in
factories while many educated young workers are unemployed or
underemployed. A national survey of urban residents, released this
winter by a Chinese university, showed that among people in their early
20s, those with a college degree were four times as likely to be
unemployed as those with only an elementary school education.
It is a problem that Chinese officials are acutely aware of.
“There is a structural mismatch — on the one hand, the factories
cannot find skilled labor, and, on the other hand, the universities
produce students who do not want the jobs available,” said Ye Zhihong, a
deputy secretary general of China’s Education Ministry.
China’s swift expansion in education over the last decade, including a
quadrupling of the number of college graduates each year, has created
millions of engineers and scientists. The best can have their pick of
jobs at Chinese companies that are aiming to become even more
competitive globally.
But China is also churning out millions of graduates with few
marketable skills, coupled with a conviction that they are entitled to
office jobs with respectable salaries.
Part of the problem seems to be a proliferation of fairly narrow
majors — Mr. Wang has a three-year associate degree in the design of
offices and trade show booths. At the same time, business and economics
majors are rapidly gaining favor on Chinese campuses at the expense of
majors like engineering, contributing to the glut of graduates with
little interest in soiling their hands on factory floors.
“This also has to do with the banking sector — they offer high-paying
jobs, so their parents want their children to go in this direction,”
Ms. Ye said.
Mr. Wang and other young, educated Chinese without steady jobs pose a
potential long-term challenge to social stability. They spend long
hours surfing the Internet, getting together with friends and
complaining about the shortage of office jobs for which they believe
they were trained.
China now has 11 times as many college students as it did at the time
of the Tiananmen Square protests in the spring of 1989, and an economy
that has been very slow to produce white-collar jobs. The younger
generation has shown less interest in political activism, although that
could change if the growing numbers of graduates cannot find satisfying
work.
Prime Minister
Wen Jiabao
acknowledged last March that only 78 percent of the previous year’s
college graduates had found jobs. But even that figure may overstate
employment for the young and educated.
The government includes not just people in long-term jobs but also
freelancers, temporary workers, graduate students and people who have
signed job contracts but not started work yet, as well as many people in
make-work jobs that state-controlled companies across China have been
ordered to create for new graduates.
Yin Weimin, the minister of human resources and social security, said
in a speech last spring that “the major emphasis will be on solving the
employment problem among college graduates.”
Picky College Graduates
Mr. Wang is the youngest of four children. He was born in late 1987,
as the “one child policy” was barely beginning to be enforced in rural
areas. His less-educated siblings have also been leery of taking
well-paid factory jobs. A brother, who got a one-year degree in mobile
phone equipment after high school, opened a luggage shop. Neither of his
sisters attended high school. One is a saleswoman in a clothing store,
and the other is a homemaker and mother who married a factory worker.
An aversion to factory labor is common in China today, said Mary E.
Gallagher, the director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the
University of Michigan and a specialist in Chinese labor issues.
“Students themselves have not adjusted to the concept of mass
education, so students are accustomed to seeing themselves as becoming
part of an elite when they enter college,” she said.
China has a millenniums-old Confucian tradition in which educated
people do not engage in manual labor. But its economy still largely
produces blue-collar jobs. Manufacturing, mining and construction
represent 47 percent of China’s economic output, twice their share in
the United States, and the service sector is far less developed.
The glut of college graduates is eroding wages even for those with
more marketable majors, like computer science. In 2000, the prevailing
wage at top companies for fresh graduates with computer science degrees
was about $725 a month in Shenzhen, roughly 10 times the wage then of a
blue-collar worker who had not finished high school, said an executive
who insisted on anonymity because of controversy in China over wages.
But today, new computer science graduates are so plentiful that their
pay in Shenzhen has fallen to just $550 a month, less than double the
wage of a blue-collar worker. And that is without adjusting for
inflation over the last decade. Consumer prices have risen 29 percent in
Shenzhen, according to official data that many economists say
understates the true increase in consumer prices.
If Mr. Wang were willing to take a factory job, his interest in
indoor design might take him to Hongyuan Furniture, a manufacturer of
home saunas a 45-minute drive south across Guangzhou from his home.
The factory now offers newcomers 2,500 renminbi a month, about $395,
before overtime. Six-person dorm rooms have been replaced with
two-person apartments. Workers no longer have to hand over part of their
wages to the foreman. Instead, the factory now pays a bonus to foremen
of $8 to $16 for each month that a new blue-collar employee stays on the
job. Yet the factory still struggles to find workers.
The company’s labor costs per worker — wages plus benefits — have
been rising 30 percent or more each year. That is faster than the
national pace of 21 percent for migrant workers, although there have
been signs that pace may have slowed recently with a broader
deceleration in the Chinese economy. And it is considerably faster than
the 13 percent annual increase in minimum wages — roughly three times
inflation — that the government has mandated through 2015.
Wages at Hongyuan Furniture are rising particularly fast because it
is in an area of Guangzhou that was slower to develop. Before wages
began surging five years ago, the company paid $90 to $120 a month to
new workers without experience. Workers then were also expected to pay
$13 to $40 of their monthly pay for the first six months to their
foreman in a sort of informal apprenticeship, said Ni Bingbing, the
company’s vice general manager.
Plenty of college graduates apply for jobs at the company, but they
are not desperate enough to accept blue-collar tasks, Ms. Ni said. The
sauna factory has better ventilation than many Chinese factories, but it
is not air-conditioned. The many power tools kick up a fine mist of
sawdust that coats every surface — not the sort of place where a college
graduate can go to work in a dress shirt and then head straight to a
restaurant or nightclub in the evening.
Subsidized by Parents
One unusual social dynamic created by the one-child policy is that
many college graduates are only children with parents and grandparents
who continue to nurture them into adulthood.
“Their parents, their grandparents give them money; they have six
people to support them,” Ms. Ni said. “They say, Why do I need to work? I
can stay home and get 2,000 renminbi a month, why should I get on a bus
every day to earn 2,500 a month?” That is how Mr. Wang has managed to
get by for most of the last three years without a job. Despite some
grumbling, his parents send him money to help support his modest
lifestyle.
He rents a small but tidy studio apartment. It consists of a bedroom
with a pink tile floor roughly 10 feet on a side, holding a low bed and a
bedside table with a laptop on it. A plugged hole in the wall shows
that a previous occupant had an air-conditioner to cope with Guangzhou’s
heat, but Mr. Wang makes do with a fan. An adjacent room, about 10 feet
long and just three feet wide, holds a tiny kitchen, shower and toilet.
The apartment costs $64 a month. Food, Internet cafe visits and the
occasional date cost him $80 a month; fixed-line Internet service costs
$8 a month; and electricity and water bills together are another $8 a
month, for a total of $160 a month.
In addition to covering these expenses, Mr. Wang’s parents also paid
back the money he borrowed from friends to pay for his three-year
degree, which cost $1,270 a year in tuition and another $320 a year in
living costs.
As was common in rural China until very recently, his mother never
went to school while his father attended elementary school for several
years before dropping out. Now in their 60s, his parents had to give up
their rice farm when the local government redeveloped the land it was
on; Mr. Wang’s father does odd jobs as a construction worker to help
support his son.
Not surprisingly, they have urged Mr. Wang to take one of the many
factory jobs available. “You can get paid 4,000 renminbi [$635] a month
for taking such work, but I wouldn’t do it,” Mr. Wang said. “Your hands
are dirty, you’re all dirty. It’s not for me.”
He has worked brief stints. After a nearly yearlong stretch out of
work, he took a job several months ago as an office building security
guard. It pays just $320 a month — but he already is thinking of
quitting after Chinese New Year celebrations next month, and dedicating
himself full time once again to the search for an office job that would
allow him to use his degree. Entry-level positions in his field pay only
$240 a month, but the work is clean and safe and there is the prospect
of promotion. Even better would be to find a municipal agency willing to
hire him, he said.
“The best is a government job; you have job security and a retirement fund,” Mr. Wang said.
Mr. Wang counts himself fortunate to have a girlfriend. She has tried
to sell Amway cosmetics to her friends, but in her best month only
earned $160, and often earns nothing at all in a month. Her apartment
costs 1,200 renminbi, about $190, a month, and she is also subsidized by
her parents — her father is a salesman for construction materials while
her mother is a nanny.
“My girlfriend says, ‘What you’re earning now is definitely not
enough for marriage, you need at least 10,000 renminbi a month, 26,000
would be good,’ so I’m under extreme stress right now,” Mr. Wang said.
“All the women are like that now — they want the car, they want the
apartment, they want the appliances — of course, I always say yes to my
girlfriend.”
Young college graduates like Mr. Wang do not want factory jobs even
though companies increasingly offer blue-collar workers the kinds of
benefits that many white-collar workers could not aspire to until
recently.
TAL Group, a large manufacturer of high-end shirts headquartered in
Hong Kong, not only air-conditions its sprawling shirt factory in
southeastern China, something many American factories still do not do,
but it has even opened a library with 50 Internet-connected desktop
computers for employees to use after work.
The combination of the one-child policy and rising rates of college
education is only starting to hit the core of China’s factory work
force: 18- to 21-year-olds not in college. Their numbers are on track to
plunge by 29 percent from 2010 to 2020 even if enrollments in higher
education hold steady.
Decline of Technical Training
As hundreds of thousands of factories have opened across the country
over the last decade, they have struggled to find workers who can
operate their complicated equipment, much less fix it. Yet the number of
those receiving vocational training has stagnated to the point that
they are now outnumbered roughly two to one by students pursuing more
academic courses of study.
“We have jobs and positions for which skilled workers cannot be
found, and on the other hand, we have talented people who cannot find
jobs; technical and vocational education and training is the answer,”
said Lu Xin, the vice minister of education, at a conference last June.
China’s vocational secondary schools and training programs are
unpopular because they are seen as dead-ends, with virtually no chance
of moving on to a four-year university. They also suffer from a stigma:
they are seen as schools for people from peasant backgrounds, and are
seldom chosen by more affluent and better-educated students from towns
and cities.
Many youths from rural areas who graduate from college, like Mr.
Wang, are also hostile to factory jobs. He is toying with other ideas to
earn a living, but learning vocational skills is not one of them. One
idea is to buy rabbits from wholesalers in the countryside, set out a
mat along a Guangzhou street and sell the animals as pets or food.
When told that this might involve competing with older, uneducated
rural migrants willing to work for almost nothing as sidewalk vendors,
he shrugged and reiterated his hostility to factory labor.
“I’m not afraid of hard work; it’s the lack of status,” he said. “The
more educated people are, the less they want to work in a factory.”
Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession
is published by Jossey-Bass. Authors are Anne Colby, Thomas Ehrlich,
William M. Sullivan and Jonathan R. Dolle. The Business,
Entrepreneurship and Liberal Learning (BELL) project, from which this
work was drawn, was funded by Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching, the Teagle Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation,
the Skoll Foundation, and Carnegie Corporation of New York. For more
information, visit www.carnegiehighered.org.
