Society

Hostels provide refuge for city job seekers

By Yu Ran (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-07-05 08:00

New generation

Traditional migrant workers have experience working in fields. The new ones were brought up in cities by their migrant worker parents, and they either stayed there or moved to other cities to work right after graduating from college.

This new generation of migrant workers accounts for 61.6 percent of China's migrant population, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Shanghai's 23 million residents include 9 million new generation migrants, 39 percent of the population.

A report released by All-China Federation of Trade Unions defined the new generation as those born in 1980 or later, who are 16 or older and who work in cities but still have a rural hukou (household registration).

Zhou Chenjing, 28, is typical of the new, white-collar migrant workers in Shanghai. She sees herself as a strong woman who has suffered enough to receive better social benefits in the city.

Like most migrant workers, Zhou came to Shanghai five years ago with nothing. She squeezed into a mixed-gender underground job hostel for a month, shared an apartment with a stranger and her boyfriend for nearly a year and now lives with a friend in a two-bedroom apartment.

"I changed jobs four times before obtaining the current one," said Zhou, who is a quality inspector at a toy factory in Shanghai. "I was not satisfied with the salaries and social benefits. I believed that I deserved more than what my former employers offered."

According to market data, the average monthly pay for basic service jobs in Shanghai is about 1,300 yuan, barely enough for a migrant worker to feed herself.

Zhou's first job was as an intern at a trading company. She worked three months, getting paid 1,500 yuan a month, and left in the fourth when the boss refused to raise her salary to 3,000 yuan, as agreed.

"I didn't expect to make more than 5,000 yuan a month but I preferred to have a more kindly employer who would take care of staff members by offering social insurance and reasonable subsidies," Zhou said. Her current net income is 4,500 yuan.

High expectations

Li Huaying, who owns a local job agency, has been in charge of migrant worker recruitment for years. The agency holds job fairs at Shanghai Railway Station each year after Spring Festival, recruiting workers who went home for the holiday, and in the summer, to reach migrant college graduates.

"The situation was extremely tough this year because only dozens of applicants handed in resumes while hundreds of positions were available," Li said. "Few local laid-off and retired workers want to lower their status to work in factories."

But it is not factory jobs that newly minted college graduates are looking for. Li said the migrant job applicants, like Zhou, are more concerned than Shanghai residents with the work environment, social welfare, leisure time and monthly incomes of 3,000 yuan or more.

Those kinds of expectations make their job search tougher - and extend the young migrants' stays in temporary housing.

Tong, the job hostel owner, estimated that Shanghai has more than 100 registered job hostels accommodating at least 10,000 recent college graduates, and more than 500 illegal hostels serving thousands more.

Ren Yuan, a professor in Fudan University's school of social development and public policy, considers housing one of the top essential problems for job seekers. He said it should be solved through cooperation between government and the local authorized job hostels as soon as possible - by shutting down the illegal, underground hostels and easing the property difficulties among young migrant graduates.

"Shanghai, as the pioneer in first-tier cities, has to respect each individual new migrant and provide better working and living conditions to each of them, then help them fit in the society well," Ren said.