Precarious work in China is a problem that deserves more attention – 04/28/2023 – Igor Patrick

Ask any sinologist or observer of China to point out the country’s biggest challenges in the coming years, and the list will be long — real estate crisis, tensions with the US, difficulties in attracting foreign direct investment, demography… The themes are routine and come and go. stockings make headlines around the world. There is, however, a problem that rarely draws the attention of the press: the precariousness of work.

Earlier this week, couriers via the app in the province of Guangzhou decided to cross their arms, in protest triggered by the tightening of rules on delivery platforms. Meituan, which pays an average of R$ 2.73 per delivery, announced that it would establish fines for those who refuse to work on rainy days and threatened to reduce the amounts passed on to workers.

This is not a new fact nor is it exclusive to China, but strikes of this type are happening more and more frequently in the country, with complaints almost always centered on exhausting working hours, meager social protection and terrible amounts paid.

China became known worldwide for unhealthy job openings and poor pay, but now this phenomenon has a new aspect. The rapid and constant opening of the economy profoundly transformed the social fabric, making the market more competitive and hostile to those without academic training (still the vast majority of the population today). In addition, the hukou system, developed to discourage internal migration by limiting Chinese access to public services outside their hometowns, also relegated these workers to an unprecedented precarious status.

It remains for those who leave the interior, still underdeveloped in relation to the opulent metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai, to settle for “odd jobs”. They are food and merchandise delivery people, but also bricklayers, waiters, supermarket cashiers… Mostly young people attracted by the plentiful job offer in the big cities and who are responsible for the subsistence of their children and parents living in the countryside.

Driven by the need to save and send money home, they submit themselves to exhausting journeys and resent a system managed by official policy that even in the 1970s authorized some to “get rich first”, creating an abyss of inequality in the process.

In 2022, the population has stopped growing and, thanks to the increase in life expectancy, the country is aging faster. By 2030, experts estimate that 30% of Chinese will be aged 65 or older, with significant reductions in the available workforce. In practice, it means that today’s young people will be responsible for filling the hole in modest pensions and for subsidizing their own expenses and also those of elderly parents, uncles and grandparents, in a gradually more numerous group.

This is only possible in underemployment (yes, in the plural), with shifts that tend to be longer, creating problems for the physical and mental health of young natives of the so-called market capitalism. Thus, the accumulation of functions will no longer be an extra and will appear as a first-order need.

Adapting to new times will require the government to be very flexible. Unlike the older population, today’s young people were born in a prosperous country in terms of economy. Working to not die of starvation, something so common in China in the mid-20th century, sounds like an anecdote for many of them. The young Chinese are in a hurry for viable answers that the government may not yet have.

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