From Harvard Business Review (link):
It’s well known that low-skilled Chinese labor is abundant. Over the past two decades, some 140 million low-skilled workers have either moved off the payrolls of state-owned enterprises into the private sector or migrated out of rural areas into the cities to seek their fortunes.
What’s less well known is that the average worker earns just 75 cents an hour. Migrant workers”who account for one-fifth of the 750 million people in China’s labor market”typically earn less than $130 a month. When you are making that kind of money, a five-cent-an-hour raise is a significant increase. No wonder, then, that Chinese workers leave their employers in droves. Turnover rates among low-skilled workers are frequently in the range of 30% to 40% annually”and sometimes rise above 100%. Compare those figures with industrialized countries, in which annual employee turnover rates in manufacturing are roughly 5%.
