“Discriminatory rules against AIDS patients in the public servants’ physical examination fly in the face of Chinese law,” Yu Fangqiang, a lawyer and activist with the pressure group Tianxia Gong told AFP.

Yu said the education departments and a court that refused to hear the case of one of the men had violated the Prevention and Treatment of Infectious Diseases and Employment Promotion laws and the Regulation on the Prevention and Treatment of HIV/AIDS.

UNAIDS China country coordinator Mark Stirling said the organisation was watching China’s reaction to the appeal closely.

“There should be no discrimination. Employment should be based solely on qualifications, not on a teacher’s HIV status,” Stirling told AFP. “The risk of HIV-AIDS transmission in a classroom setting is virtually nil.”

According to the Chinese Center for Disease Control (CDC), there are 434,000 registered HIV and AIDS patients in China, but there are estimates that predict 787,000 carriers by the end of 2011. Xinhua adds:

China has been boosting distribution of HIV/AIDS tests among spouses of carriers and others who have close contact with them, the statement said, adding that a total of 67.45 million HIV tests were conducted across the country between January and October, up 16.5 percent year-on-year.

These tests found 61,000 HIV carriers and AIDS patients.

The latest figures from the CDC showed that China has registered 434,000 HIV carriers and AIDS patients, as well as 88,000 deaths due to the disease, since 1985, when the first case was found in the country.

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Post tags: AIDS, aids discrimination, aids rate, employment, HIV, HIV/AIDS, public health, teachers
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Bruce Rockowitz, the chief executive of Li & Fung, the largest trading company supplying Chinese consumer goods to American retail chains, said in a speech here on Tuesday that the company’s average costs for goods rose 15 percent in the first five months of this year compared with the same period last year. Executives at other consumer goods companies have encountered similar or larger increases.

Airline flights to Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia and other low-wage Asian countries are packed these days with executives looking for alternatives to double-digit wage increases in China. But wages are rising as fast or faster in many of these countries, following China’s example, while commodity prices have surged around the world, leaving buyers with few places to turn.

Bangladesh raised its minimum wage by 87 percent late last year, yet apparel factories there are still struggling to find enough workers to complete ever-rising numbers of orders. “Everywhere you see signs saying ‘people wanted,’ “ said Annisul Huq, the chairman of the Mohammadi Group, a large Bangladesh garment manufacturer.

An article in the Washington Post points to the role demographics is playing in this change:

In a shift that is intensifying the economic competition between China and the United States, China’s working-age population has plateaued in size and will begin getting smaller sometime in the next five years, according to demographers and recently released census data. The number of 20-to-24-year-olds, a main source of entry-level and factory labor, is already shrinking, the leading edge of an eventual decline in the overall population.

The demographic change is ushering in higher wages and inflation and remaking the country’s social fabric — particularly in rural villages such as this one south of Beijing, where working adults have all but disappeared to major cities. If there are children, they are living with or visiting grandparents.

American companies that earned ill-will at home for shipping workers overseas are now starting to bring them back home, a column in the Globe and Mail states:

Caterpillar Inc. decided to build its next manufacturing plant in Texas. NCR Corp. decided to move production of its automated teller machines from China to Georgia. Wham-O Inc., the iconic toy maker, decided to repatriate 50 per cent of its Frisbee and Hula Hoop production from China. BCG said many more such decisions will occur as wage rates for skilled workers rise in China, year after year, at double-digit rates.

“All over China, wages are climbing at the rate of 15 per cent to 20 per cent a year …,” Harold Sirkin, a BCG senior partner, said in a release. “We expect net labour costs for manufacturing in China and the U.S. to converge by around 2015. As a result … you’re going to see a lot more products ‘Made in the USA’ in the next five years.”

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Post tags: employment, exports, made in China, manufacturing, migrant workers, sweatshops, U.S trade, wages
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We reached Tangjialing after leaving behind Beijing’s smooth six and eight-lane highways and gleaming skyscrapers, the cheap KFCs and luxury malls. We drove past barren farmland and stopped under an arch that proclaimed we had reached Tangjialing. Beyond it, stood crowds of students waiting for buses while they munched pancakes and steamed buns sold on handcarts.

There was no coffeeshop or a teahouse in sight, just rows of former two-storey buildings where fifth and sixth floors had been added to accommodate the business of migrants. An unknown number of these residents depend on public toilets and baths hundreds of meters away from their 10 sq m cubbyholes.

Tangjialing has become a centre of Chinese media attention as a reflection of the fast-paced economy’s inability to create enough meaningful jobs for the annual six million-plus Chinese graduates in their own hometowns. When we wandered down the narrow streets, the students refused to chat.

But Sheng Fei Guo, a bespectacled intern who wears his IBM identity card even on weekends, showed us his spartan one-room apartment worth 500 yuan (Rs 3,500) in rent. We asked him if there was a community place with benches where we could chat. He laughed.

Beijing Today writes that Tangjialing is soon to be bulldozed and rebuilt.

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Post tags: employment, graduates, Tangjialing
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Some estimate that 30 percent of Chinese engineering students will not find jobs after graduation and that the average pay of the college graduates is now approaching that of rural migrant workers. At the same time, factories in Guangdong province cannot find enough labor. What is going on?

The idea that China is running out of unskilled labor is a myth. The news reports typically concentrate on Guangdong but this does not mean the country as a whole is short of unskilled labor. Development in rural areas in the past six years has meant that rural residents, previously denied economic opportunities close to home, now have a choice between going to Guangdong and staying in their hometowns. Many choose to stay. Any “labor shortage” in Guangdong is mostly evidence that the factories should not be located there in the first place.

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They are smart, industrious and marginalised, huddling together for comfort.

Hordes of China’s underemployed or underpaid university graduates have formed squalid enclaves on the fringes of the country’s big cities, earning themselves the label yi zu or ‘ant tribe’.

As their ranks swell, some observers have warned of the dangers that a mass of young and frustrated people – doing jobs they are overqualified for – might pose to social stability.

Last month, several delegates at Beijing’s annual parliamentary session urged the government to build better housing for these graduates and to do more to help them find jobs.

There are a million ‘ants’ massed around major cities, with about 100,000 in Beijing alone, estimates sociologist Lian Si, who led a two-year study that was published in a book last September.

A typical ‘ant’ hails from rural China, is a graduate of a non-brand-name university aged between 22 and 29, and earns no more than 2,000 yuan (S $414) a month working long hours as an insurance salesman, computer technician or waiter.

The LA Times has published other case studies on members of the “Ant Tribe” as well as a the socio-historical background to the crisis:

… an estimated 3 million jobless or underemployed college graduates in China, products of a mass social experiment by central planners to churn out more professionals for China’s economic development. Nicknamed the Ant Tribe, after the title of a recent book documenting their struggles, they now constitute a vast army of educated young people whose growing restlessness worries the Chinese government.

“They represent the pain and confusion of a whole generation,” wrote author Lian Si, a sociologist who spent two years living with and researching the graduates. “When all their anger and grievances reach a critical point, a special event could trigger a large-scale mass movement.”

Recognizing the potential threat, Beijing is urging state-run companies to put college graduates on their payrolls, and it’s encouraging degree holders to work in the countryside. Others are being steered into the military. State media have reported female graduates seeking marriage just end their fruitless job hunt.

The ants’ story began a little over a decade ago, in 1999, when the Chinese government launched an ambitious plan to boost university enrollment by 30% annually. At the time, the country’s factories were suffering from the Asian financial crisis. Planners believed a rise in college rolls would help China transition from a largely export-driven, low-wage manufacturing economy to a more balanced one populated by upwardly mobile white-collar workers.

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Post tags: Ant Tribe, college students, employment
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Young foreigners like Reasbeck are coming to China to look for work in its unfamiliar but less bleak economy, driven by the worst job markets in decades in the United States, Europe and some Asian countries.

Many do basic work such as teaching English, a service in demand from Chinese businesspeople and students. But a growing number are arriving with skills and experience in computers, finance and other fields.

“China is really the land of opportunity now, compared to their home countries,” said Chris Watkins, manager for China and Hong Kong of MRI China Group, a headhunting firm. “This includes college graduates as well as maybe more established businesspeople, entrepreneurs and executives from companies around the world.”

Watkins said the number of resumes his company receives from abroad has tripled over the past 18 months.

See a previous article on this topic from the New York Times.

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Post tags: employment, financial crisis 2009, foreigners in China
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While China has long since replaced its communist economy with a kind of raw capitalism and is fast ascending to the rank of superpower, its relationship with its own citizens remains partly stuck in its totalitarian past. The state continues to keep a secret dossier on every working citizen, which helps it retain its absolute power over the individual.

The fate that Mr Zhu and an estimated hundreds of thousands of others – although there are no reliable records on exactly how many – have suffered under this system serves as a reminder of the limits of Beijing’s market reforms.

According to Mr Zhu, back in 1994 – following an argument with his supervisor at ICBC – crucial documentation proving his cadre status, higher than that of his “worker” colleagues, disappeared from his employee file, making him unemployable for other institutions and stripping him of part of the pension benefits he had earned.

After suing ICBC without result, Mr Zhu is now going after its shareholders in a Kafka-esque fight to uncover the truth about his own past and salvage what remains of his future.

Read a previous report from the New York Times about what happens when a student’s file goes missing.

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Job seekers in China will face an uphill battle in the coming months and as many as 12 million may not find work this year even if the country hits its 8 percent growth target, the nation’s top employment official said on Friday.

Yin Weimin, minister of human resources and social security, said China will be able to provide openings for about half of its 24 million job hunters, if it meets the growth target for 2009.

“The shortfall between supply and demand (in employment) will become larger than last year due to the failure to create enough job opportunities,” he said in a report carried in People’s Daily.

The country is trying to meet the “very tough” challenge of finding enough jobs for workers at a time when the global financial crisis is biting deep into the Chinese economy and the employment rate within export-oriented enterprises is falling sharply, he said.

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The effects of China’s stimulus efforts are filtering into the job market, with the government reporting that most rural migrant workers have now found new jobs after the mass layoffs of late last year.

But the downturn is still being felt in weaker growth of household incomes, which could hold back consumer spending.

Wang Yadong, a deputy director-general at China’s labor ministry, said Tuesday that less than 3% of migrant workers who have returned to cities in recent months are still looking for jobs. And 95% of migrant workers preferred to seek work in cities this year rather than go back to farming, he said.

Though Mr. Wang declined to give more detailed figures, his report still represents the first official update of migrants’ job situation since February.

Update: A Los Angeles Times report on Wang’s remarks paint a different picture:

Beijing is trying to create jobs for laid-off workers, new college graduates, migrants and others, said Wang Yadong, deputy director of job promotion at the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.

“The employment situation in China is still very grave. We are still under enormous pressure to provide employment services,” Wang said at a news conference.

Officials have warned that China’s recovery is not firmly established despite an acceleration in economic growth last quarter to 7.9 percent over a year earlier, up from 6.1 percent the previous quarter. That was boosted by Beijing’s 4 trillion yuan ($586 billion) stimulus, which is pumping money into the economy through building highways and other public works that have created construction jobs.

“To make things worse, the financial crisis has still not bottomed out,” Wang said. “There is still a great potential risk of unemployment.”

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Some Chinese universities have inflated graduate employment figures by issuing bogus work contracts as millions struggle to find work amid the downturn, an official newspaper said on Tuesday.

The financial crisis has intensified the problem of graduate unemployment, which stems from rapidly increasing enrolment at Chinese universities, many of which fail to adequately train their graduates.

If widespread, this could cast doubt on recent official reports that graduate unemployment has now substantially eased, with an estimated 6.1 million new graduates in China this year.

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