WAGES INCREASING IN CHINA

From The New York Times:

Chinese wages are on the rise. No reliable figures for average wages exist; the government’s economic data are notably unreliable. But factory owners and experts who monitor the nation’s labor market say that businesses are having a hard time finding able-bodied workers and are having to pay the workers they can find more money.

Chinese officials are quick to say that there is no overall shortage of labor — rather, there is a shortage of young workers willing to accept the low wages that prevailed in the 1990s. Factories in cities like Guangzhou advertise heavily for young workers, even while employment offices consider it a success if someone over 40 can find any job in less than a year.

“Now they’re taking workers into their early 30s,” said Jonathan Unger, director of the Contemporary China Center at Australian National University in Canberra, “but anything older than that and they think they can’t take the conditions, the 11-hour days,” as well as work on weekends, and a tedious life in factory-owned dormitories.

This lack of laborers of desirable age is hardly making China a worker’s paradise. Factory wages remain extremely low by Western standards: roughly $1 an hour for better-paid workers near the coast, compared with as little as 50 cents early this decade.

Moreover, labor regulation is weak in China, as shown most vividly this year by the discovery that brick kilns in the north of the country had kidnapped and enslaved hundreds of children and mentally disadvantaged adults, working them under brutal conditions with little or no pay.

And wages are stagnating in the middle of the labor market — workers who consider themselves too educated for entry-level jobs in a garment factory, but lacking the skills or experience to command a premium salary elsewhere. “It’s easy to find a job with not a very high salary,” said Chen Zheng, a 24-year-old auto worker and high school graduate in Ningbo. “It’s not easy if you want a higher wage.”