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Migrant workers bear brunt of crisis

By Wu Jiao (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-11-21 07:23

Migrant workers carrying their belongings walk out of the Fuyang railway station in Anhui province yesterday. Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers have to return home from cities as shrinking orders from overseas has forced many manufacturers to close shop or cut the staff strength. [China Daily]

To go home, or not to go home: that is the question for Huang Bingnan. The 31-year-old and his wife lost their jobs in a machinery factory in Dongguan last month.

Plants in the city in Guangdong province were running day and night till a few months ago. But shrinking orders from overseas has forced many manufacturers to close shop or cut their staff strength.

"It's very difficult to find another job (in the city) during these difficult times," Huang said Thursday.

It is people like Huang that the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security is for the first time trying to register as unemployed, so that they get the help and benefit to start life afresh.

The government till now has followed an urban registered unemployment rate to reflect its job market.

The Huang couple face another problem if they decide to stick around in Dongguan to test the waters: they have to pay 500 yuan a month for the 9-sq-m shanty they have called their home for three years.

"We have to go home probably. But that would be our last choice," Huang said.

Their reluctance to return to their native Anhui province is understandable. They want to earn enough to build a two-story house in their village.

But unlike the Huang couple, a lot of laid-off migrant workers have already returned home. And an increasing number of labor disputes have been reported in the past few months.

Migrant workers are the worst-affected group by the global economic downturn, Minister of Human Resources and Social Security Yin Weimin told a press conference Thursday.

For instance, about 300,000 of the 6.8 million migrant workers from Jiangxi had returned home by mid-November. The situation is similar in Hubei province, where about 300,000 of its 7 million migrants have returned from cities.

China's rapid growth has been fuelled, at least in part, by about 230 million farmers-turned-workers. But these very people are being laid off in increasing numbers as the global financial crisis starts hurting the export-oriented small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

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