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The New Generation of Migrant Workers in Urban China

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Urban China in the New Era

Abstract

After three decades of contributing to the Chinese economy and society, the first generation of rural-to-urban migrant workers is being replaced by a new generation in the urban labour market. The study aims to better depict the nature of the cohort, and thus promotes a better understanding of this group. This study presents a different portrait of migrant workers from previous research because getting urban jobs and wage income has become a means to embrace urban life for new-generation migrant workers, rather than the sole or major purpose of migration. In contrast to their predecessors, these new migrant workers are younger, better educated, less connected to the countryside, and have a broad urban dream. This study draws on original data from interviews of migrant workers, employers, managers and government officials, comparing the two generations and examining their living and working conditions and aspirations in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong province. They are in difficulties and confusion caused by a long-standing rural–urban divide, thwarted by institutional barriers and market forces. Investments in rural human capital development, in addition to institutional reform, are needed to address their concerns.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Outgoing migrant workers are defined as those who work and live outside their home village. Local migrant workers (bendi nongminggong), at 85 million in 2009, work in nearby towns but live in their home village.

  2. 2.

    If the group constituting local migrant workers is also included, the population of the new generation reached nearly 100 million.

  3. 3.

    This chapter does not intend to over-generalise the two generations, but to provide some comparisons in a research context. Therefore it does not imply that a migrant must have all the same characteristics as the others in the same generation.

  4. 4.

    Also see the New York Times’ Room for Debate blog: What do China’s workers want? (Editors 2010).

  5. 5.

    But this may be only the tip of the iceberg, due to the news blackout by Foxconn and media censorship.

  6. 6.

    Foxconn’s harsh labour conditions have been reported much earlier than 2010. See, for example, an investigation by UK’s The Mail on Sunday (Anonymity 2006), among many others.

  7. 7.

    Another survey, mostly on skilled workers in formal enterprise employment, suggests that 67.2 % of new-generation migrant workers finished senior high school and above, 18 % higher than the first generation. See ACFTU (2011).

  8. 8.

    Nonetheless, according to one of the experts on the aforementioned New York Times blog, employees do not necessarily have the time to use the facilities. This is also exactly what we found.

  9. 9.

    A temporary resident permit, or zhanzhu zheng, was required for all non-local hukou migrants in order for them to live and work in cities legally. The system was fiercely criticized, and its associated repatriation (shourong qiansong) policy for unregistered migrants was eventually abolished after Sun Zhigang, a college graduate who was unable to present his permit to police, was arrested by authorities and beaten to death in Guangzhou in 2003.

  10. 10.

    The authorities believed that media coverage of these suicide attempts and violence has encouraged migrant workers to adopt similar radical approaches to fight for back pay. Therefore this type of media report has been mostly forbidden in recent years.

  11. 11.

    Wage in arrears is the most important source of conflict between labour and management in the private sector (CLB 2007).

  12. 12.

    In Henan cities, urban neighbourhood committees were asked by the governments to recruit workers for the Zhengzhou campus of Foxconn that is planned to accommodate 140,000 workers (Foxconn 2011). In addition, some occupational school and college diploma students were forced to travel to and from work as trainees in the Shenzhen campus of Foxconn for at least three months to fulfil degree requirements. In some of the twelve Foxconn campuses, more than half of the workers were student trainees without contracts and contributions to their social insurance programmes (JRG 2010).

  13. 13.

    It should be pointed out that this figure represents only formally employed workers (i.e. with labour contract).

  14. 14.

    In August 2011, thirty schools of this type for migrants’ children in Beijing were closed or demolished. As a result, 30,000 pupils and students lost their classrooms (Jacobs 2011).

  15. 15.

    See, for example, studies by Ngan and Ma (2008), and Peng (2008).

  16. 16.

    For one of the studies on this, see Lin and Tong (2008).

  17. 17.

    These two surveys might have underestimated the working hours in general. Another two studies find that migrant workers worked 11 h a day, 26 days a month (CLB 2008), and 90 % of them worked more than the maximum working hours (44 h/week), ranging from 58.2 to more than 60 h per week. See (NBSC 2010a).

  18. 18.

    The legal overtime wage rate is 1.5 to three times the normal rate. However, not every employer obeys these legal requirements regarding the overtime wage rate, or they only offer a normal wage rate for overtime work.

  19. 19.

    One reason is that there is not much difference between factories, according to interviewees who have changed jobs.

  20. 20.

    A quantitative study by Smyth et al. (2009) also reveals similar findings.

  21. 21.

    But migrant workers have difficulties in obtaining official accreditation of their occupational skills and techniques (Li 2010c).

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  1. School of Economics, The University of Wollongong, Northfields Avenue, Wollongong, NSW, 2522, Australia

    Zhiming Cheng

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  1. School of Economics, The University of Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia

    Zhiming Cheng

  2. Department of Resource Management and Geograph, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Mark Wang

  3. School of Management Science and Engineering, Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing, China

    Junhua Chen

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Cheng, Z. (2014). The New Generation of Migrant Workers in Urban China. In: Cheng, Z., Wang, M., Chen, J. (eds) Urban China in the New Era. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54227-5_7

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