Chapter 12 Chapter 11 Make Migrant Workers Real City People

Walking on the streets of any city in China, we can always see migrant workers working hard.According to statistics, more than 150 million peasants in China have migrated to cities to work.Since 2005, farmers' income from working has exceeded their income from agriculture. Although the migration of migrant workers to cities has become part of China's urbanization, most of them have limited technical skills and low incomes, making it difficult for them to bear the high cost of living in cities.They are often only the marginalized people in the city, maintaining the characteristics of floating population for a long time.This phenomenon is very detrimental to China's urbanization process and social stability.The process of China's urbanization is not only to build more and more high-rise buildings, but more importantly, it is people-oriented, so that more migrant workers and farmers will become urban residents.

However, China's urban-rural split dual economy was formed under the planned economy for many years.To turn migrant workers into urban residents, a series of fundamental reforms must be implemented in systems including household registration, employment, housing, education, health care, social security, and welfare.However, these reforms cannot be accomplished overnight.From the perspective of the urbanization process in developing countries, a side effect of rapid urbanization is the emergence of large-scale urban slums.The author has lived in the Philippines for a long time. Due to the needs of work, he often visits many countries in South Asia and has witnessed the tragic situation of slum dwellers.In slums, the urban poor have extremely poor living, travel, sanitation, and education conditions, which not only affect the current generation, but also affect the development of the next generation.Slums are separated from the community and normal social management, often controlled by the underworld, and become dens of urban crime.Once large-scale slums appear in cities, the process of urban development will be quite painful.Therefore, regardless of our subjective wishes, China's urbanization process should be a gradual process.

So, how can we grasp the main contradiction in this gradual process and make more migrant workers become urban residents as soon as possible? The key here is to let migrant workers have employment conditions with increasing income.It should be said that the migrant workers who have entered the city already have a job.But their initial jobs are low-skilled, and their income is not enough to maintain a normal life in the city.Therefore, it is necessary to establish a continuous training mechanism for migrant workers who have already entered the city, so that their technical level can be continuously improved, employment positions can be gradually upgraded, and wages can continue to rise.After several rounds of such training and several income upgrades, it is possible for them to stay in the city and truly become urban residents.

In recent years, the training of migrant workers in cities has become one of the important tasks of governments at all levels in China.According to statistics, since the implementation of the "Sunshine Project" in 2003, tens of millions of relocated farmers have been trained.However, the current training is mainly focused on the primary training of first-time farmers entering the city, focusing on the "training first and then employment" model.However, insufficient attention has been paid to the training of farmers who have already entered the city. Recently, Beijing Fuping Vocational Training School, led by Professor Mao Yushi and participated by the author, has made some new attempts in this regard.Founded in 2002, Fuping School is a non-profit vocational training school that trains young and middle-aged women in poverty-stricken areas to become domestic workers.We cooperate with the National Poverty Alleviation Office and the Poverty Alleviation Offices of Anhui Province, Gansu Province, Henan Province, and Hunan Province to provide women in poverty-stricken areas with one-stop services such as training, employment, supervision, and rights protection.In just a few years, Fuping has sent nearly 10,000 domestic workers to Beijing.Their annual salary is nearly 100 million RMB.In order to solve the poverty problem of their families, for their own growth, and also for the citizens in Beijing who need domestic services, they have made certain contributions.

From the practice of work, we found that many migrant workers have a strong desire to further study and improve.They are not willing to be junior waiters for a lifetime, and often start to think about how to develop further after working for one or two years.The society also has a huge demand for senior domestic workers.Some wealthy families, or families with seriously ill elderly or newborn babies need higher-level and more professional services.These families are also willing to pay a higher salary for it. Therefore, since last year, Fuping School has started retraining migrant workers who have already entered the city, in addition to continuing to carry out primary training programs.We selected some trainees with one or two years of work experience, good performance and passion for domestic service work, and provided them with professional key trainings such as elderly care and infant care.After about a month of retraining, these trainees are very popular in the market, and their wages can generally be increased by 60%-80%.

Strengthening the retraining of migrant workers is also a need for social development.With the standardization of the labor market in recent years and the increase in rural farming income, the cost of transferring labor from rural areas has continued to rise.Recently, the author learned through research in the Pearl River Delta that due to the increasing pressure of labor shortage, the basic wages of workers have increased by double digits in the past two years.This trend will continue.As the renminbi continues to appreciate, China's competitiveness in low-end products is declining.However, the competitiveness of neighboring countries, such as Vietnam, Bangladesh, India and other countries, is constantly rising.If they cannot quickly transfer to products and industries with higher added value, these enterprises will be in a very embarrassing situation.One of the important reasons why many Southeast Asian countries fell into the financial crisis back then was that they could not upgrade in time, leading to a decline in competitiveness and a decline in profit margins, which eventually caused capital flight and the country fell into a financial crisis.A necessary condition for industrial upgrading is the improvement of labor skills.Migrant workers have become the main force of front-line production in industry and service industries.Therefore, it is an urgent task to establish an education system that continuously retrains migrant workers.

We suggest that the retraining of migrant workers should be based on private vocational training.Unlike the initial training of migrant workers, which requires strong government intervention, the retraining of migrant workers should make more use of market forces.Migrant workers who have been working in cities for several years already have a certain ability to pay for training and do not need too much government subsidies.The government's direct running of schools may actually constrain the development of the market. Of course, the government is not doing nothing on this issue.The government can further relax the entry barriers to training schools for migrant workers.Relevant departments can also give tax incentives to newly established retraining schools for migrant workers.The government can also support some private demonstration schools through bidding, and help these schools find a model suitable for retraining migrant workers.Of course, another important task of the government is to gradually standardize such schools and prevent some fraudulent activities from disrupting a good market.

In short, the employment transfer of farmers in China has reached a new stage of development.There should also be a new model for the training of migrant workers.In addition to vigorously continuing to promote the basic training of migrant workers in cities, we should also pay attention to the retraining of migrant workers after entering cities.Cooperate with other supporting reform measures, especially the household registration reform and the reform of equal educational opportunities for migrant workers' children, to help more migrant workers become real urban residents, thereby accelerating China's urbanization process.