The 11 member provinces and regions of the Pan-Pearl River Delta
(Pan-PRD) cooperation bloc have agreed to set up a website this
year to provide information about job opportunities to transient
workers.
They also vowed to better safeguard the welfare of such workers
in the region during the Fourth Pan-PRD Economic and Trade
Co-operation Forum. The five-day gathering concluded
yesterday?in Changsha, capital of Hunan Provinc.
The 11 members of the bloc include nine provinces - Guangdong,
Guangxi, Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Hunan, Fujian, Hainan and
Jiangxi - and two special administrative regions - Hong Kong and
Macao. This group is often abbreviated as "9+2".
Right now, more than 60 million laborers from rural parts of the
group's nine member provinces are working as migrant workers in
cities. Thirty-five million of them are working outside their home
provinces, accounting for half of the nation's total non-native
labor force.
Since there are few forums to exchange information about labor
markets and job opportunities, many workers come to cities without
knowing whether they will be hired. As a result, they often end up
being mistreated and are even deprived of their basic rights.
The soon-to-be-established website will help distribute
knowledge about urban labor markets.
And to further improve the welfare system for migrant workers,
the central government intends to create endowment insurance
accounts for every migrant worker within the year.
"Under the current system, the amount of cooperation between
different cities' insurance systems is far from ideal," Zhang
Xiaojian, deputy-minister of labor and social security, said while
addressing the forum.
Insurance policies cannot be transferred to different cities if
the buyer moves. As a result, a lot of workers are forced to cancel
their policies when they move to other cities or return to their
hometowns, Zhang said.
In the foreseeable future, each migrant worker will be given an
insurance account, into which 5 percent of his or her monthly
income will be deposited.
The worker's employer and the community will each contribute
some money to the account as well, equivalent to 35 percent of a
worker's monthly income. The accounts will follow workers
regardless of where they choose to live in the future.
As the economic powerhouse of south China, Guangdong possesses
the biggest labor market in the 9+2 bloc.
"At the end of 2006, Guangdong had 12 million workers who were
originally from the other eight provinces," Zheng Chaoyang, the
deputy director of the provincial labor and social security
department, told China Daily.
(China Daily June 13, 2007)