Wanted: 150,000 migrant workers for Shanghai

As workers return to Shanghai from their Spring Festival migration they’ll see a few new additions to the Shanghai train stations: light posts covered with ads and job information targeted at the migrant worker population. 

Hard to miss, at the center of the pavilion outside of Shanghai Railway Station, there are two “10-meter-high LED displays highlight job advertisements to thousands of migrant workers who just returned from their hometowns after the Spring Festival holiday that ended Tuesday,” reports Shanghai Daily.

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Shanghai migrant workers were once largely ignored as merely the backs creating Shanghai’s ever expanding skyline, but now many local companies are now facing work shortages, according to State news reports, and are actively wooing returning labor.

The city’s motto for getting and keeping its workers? The slogan, "People from all over the country are welcome to participate in the construction of Shanghai."

Not quite as catchy as "Better City, Better Life," but we'll take it.

In addition to the information on the LED screen, there is also info about four city centers dedicated to job services for migrant workers.

"Many of my fellow villagers used to pay private agencies to find jobs," Ye Jiang, a migrant worker from Anhui Province told reporters. "These government institutions providing free job information are reliable and I am going to inquire." 

According to a survey conducted last year involving 700 companies in Shanghai, Shanghai Daily reports that the city was facing a workforce shortage of 150,000 personnel.

According to the country's National Bureau of Statistics, the average migrant worker in eastern China currently earns about RMB 1,455 a month, five percent more than their counterparts in Western China.

As competition between businesses looking for labor in Shanghai continues, some have even gone to the extreme of helping their current workers avoid the train station run during Spring festival, with companies sending almost 400 tourist buses, according to WantChinaTimes, to Anhui, Jiangsu, Henan and Hubei provinces to pick up workers from their homes.

Companies reaching out to workers like this is a recent development.

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Previously, many workers had to resort to paying head hunters to find jobs for them. Now with such accute worker shortages, the situation is almost reversed with some companies hiring brokers to find workers for them and paying people bonuses to accept jobs. 

Ding Feng, deputy director of Shanghai Municipal Employment Management Center for Outsiders (SMEMCO), commented to local reporters that the best way to attract migrant workers isn’t only through government-sponsored signs and centers but by companies raising wages and improving work conditions.

One reason for the shortage of migrant workers in China’s cities, including Shanghai, is that, according to an article in Xinhua Wenzhai magazine, “the reserve of potential migrant workers has fallen by 20 million people during the past three years.”