Bloomberg News reports
Cracks are starting to show in China's labor market as struggling industrial firms leave millions of workers in flux.
While official jobless numbers haven't budged, the underemployment rate has jumped to more than 5 percent from near zero in 2010, according to Bai Peiwei, an economics professor at Xiamen University. Bai estimates the rate may be 10 percent in industries with excess capacity, such as unprofitable steel mills and coal mines that have slashed pay, reduced shifts, and required unpaid leave.
Many state-owned firms battling overcapacity favor putting workers in a holding pattern to avoid mass layoffs that risk fueling social unrest. While that helps airbrush the appearance of duress, it also slows the shift of workers to services jobs, where labor demand remains more solid in China's shifting economy.
[...] "Underemployment is especially rampant at state-owned companies", said Zeng Xiangquan, a professor of labor and human resources at Renmin University in Beijing. "The government tends to overprotect them." That keeps laid-off workers from getting retrained and hired into new jobs in more thriving sectors like services or high-end manufacturing, Zeng said.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @05:05PM