2. Migrant Workers

The population is young, mobile, less educated, and not highly skilled.

As a result of open-door policies and thirty years of reform, China has become the “world’s factory” and given rise to a new working class comprised of rural migrant workers.

China has had a virtually inexhaustible supply of migrant workers in the past few decades, most of whom are ignorant of their rights under Chinese law and are willing to work under any conditions without protest. Rural migrant workers are employed mainly in the manufacturing and construction sectors, which account for 37.9 percent and 18.3 percent of the total, according to a survey conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and the Human Resources and Social Security Ministry. By the end of June 2009, 4.2 million rural migrant workers were still unemployed outside of their hometowns. Among those, 28.7 percent had quit their jobs because of "low income," and about 50 percent were unemployed for reasons such as "not having yet found a proper job" or "payroll cuts resulting from business closures or bankruptcy".

Guangdong Province has the largest number of migrant workers in south China and it also has the largest number of factories. There are currently more than 30,000,000 migrant workers in Guangdong province, mostly in the manufacturing sector (e.g. electronics, toys, garments, footwear, and consumer products). Of these 30 million workers, 85% are under the age of 35, and more than 52% are female, while 66% have only completed middle school. As migrant workers with rural household registrations, no matter how long they have been working in the cities, they are not permitted to stay permanently.

The turnover rate of these migrant workers is high and just 20% of workers have had some short-term skills training. Even though some migrant workers have been employed in the region for many years, the transient nature of jobs, so that workers are often changing jobs between different industry, means that they do not develop highly specialized skills. For example, workers may rapidly move between the toy industry, garment industry, and electronics industry over the period of a few years. This means that workers are not specializing in a particular career, and the jobs in most labor-intensive industries do not require special skills, so employers are not providing workers with extensive training.