The urban job creation rate of 1.05 million, while street job seekers are willing to stay up until the morning: the working conditions behind the job figures

The official “new urban employment” card, on the one hand, and the young job-seekers, on the other hand, are looking for work on the streets with cardboard. , published by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security of China, which has added 1.05 million people to the town and completed 87.7 per cent of the year's target for the first nine months of the year, and is preparing to launch a programme to support employment in services. New measures. Just early this month, in a job-seeking video distributed on social platforms, a graduate who claimed to be 25 years old had written on a cardboard that he could design, accept small and medium weeks and even work late in the morning. The two sets of information do not contradict each other, but they reveal another aspect of the Chinese job market: the increase in new employment does not amount to stable and dignified working conditions for job-seekers.

Official data mean that the target for new employment in towns is about 12 million people throughout the year, compared with an average of 1.17 million new persons per month for the first nine months. According to the Human Welfare Department, the average unemployment rate in the first eight months of the year was 5.2 per cent in the towns and cities, and the employment situation was generally stable. The policy focus will then be further shifted to services, supporting job stabilization in labour-intensive industries and finding new employment opportunities in new and emerging industries. These figures and policy arrangements illustrate the efforts being made in Beijing to maintain the scale of employment, but the challenge in the Chinese employment market is not just “no jobs”.

Working conditions on a cardboard for job search

> Video of job-seekers >, which was circulated earlier this month by a young woman with a cardboard, which describes the background of the subject, the design skills and the work arrangements she can accept. The most striking on the board is not the academic level, but the concession to overtime: working at night and in the small week seems to be a voluntary condition for job search. The identity and specific job-seeking experience described in the video cannot yet be independently confirmed by the image, nor can it represent the employment situation in the country; But this expression of active depression of working conditions constitutes a real point of view of labour market competition.

When job seekers consider “overwork until dawn” as a competitive advantage, enterprises face not only differences in job-seeking skills but also differences in bargaining power among workers. A worker can be included in the new employment statistics, but it is not necessarily possible to provide him with predictable hours of work, reasonable remuneration and stable social security. The number of jobs in the statistical tables is a figure, whereas in actual labour relations there are contract duration, compensation for overtime, contributions to social security, redundancy risks and cost of living.

Services become a new focus, and the pressure falls on those workers

The Ministry of Human Welfare has proposed that the capacity of the service sector be expanded. Services do absorb a large labour force, from catering, logistics, retail to nursing, home economics, and many jobs do not require the same long construction cycles as large industrial projects. However, these industries also have common shifts, short contracts, labour assignments and platform-based workers. The Government encourages more recruitment and the ability of workers to obtain labour law protection in their new jobs depends on local law enforcement, business arrangements and social security coverage keeping pace.

The same latest data also show the scale of social security participation: by the end of September, the number of participants in basic old-age insurance had exceeded 1,079 million, unemployment insurance had been covered by approximately 251 million and injury insurance had been covered by about 327 million; The cumulative balance of the three social insurance funds is approximately RMB 11.2 trillion. These figures indicate that the social security system is already large, but that old-age insurance covers different groups, such as retirees, and cannot be easily separated from the number of persons covered by unemployment insurance to calculate the worker ' s coverage. The real impact on the lives of the unemployed is the availability of benefits after separation, the sustainability of non-standard employment and the continuity of security in cross-regional employment.

> > > >In January of this year, the public sector introduced measures such as reduced fees, vocational training and recruitment of priority groups. At that time, the official announcement was that 12,670,000 new jobs had been created in the towns in

1. Nine months later, Beijing again re-emphasized the scope of employment and services support, suggesting that policies were not a one-off stimulus but rather a long-term task of sustaining the slowdown in growth, restructuring of business and pressure on youth to find jobs.

Number of jobs pursued by local governments, and quality of jobs determined by enterprises

The central government proposes new employment targets, local governments are responsible for recruitment, recruitment activities, employment services and statistical reporting, and enterprises ultimately decide whether to enter into contracts, how much to pay and how to organize the hours. In this chain, the Government can easily show new jobs, job fairs and training sessions; Workers are actually feeling the need to receive wages on time, to control working hours and to compensate for the loss of their jobs. The distance between the two measures determines whether “general employment stability” can be a real experience for ordinary people.

For young graduates, the mismatch between academic expansion and job needs is particularly evident. A large number of people enter the labour market, while some jobs are combined with experience, software skills, overtime commitments and low-paid expectations in the same recruitment conditions. Absorption of employment pressure with “flexible employment” can expand job opportunities in the short term, but if labour contracts, minimum wages, injury and unemployment insurance consistently lag behind changes in the way they are employed, so-called flexibility may become a unilateral exposure of workers to market risk.

The number of new jobs in towns and cities, 1.0520,000, remains a source of economic concern. It means that a large number of people have access to jobs and it also indicates that the Government must continue to invest resources in stable employment. The problem is that the figures represent a scale that cannot replace the income, security and living conditions of the workers. A young man who would like to work late at night on a cardboard for a job has shown this discrepancy in the most visible way.