Ye Weidao, 29 years old, is leaving his village for the second-year, to go laboring in the city. This time his destination is Shenzhen. He felt lucky that the trade union helped keep his job when 20 million Chinese migrants became jobless in the global financial crisis.
Ye had worked on a construction site in Guangzhou, capital city of southern Guangdong Province, since last July. When the construction came to an end in December, Ye and his colleague started to worry about their future -- the project was over and their jobs would be gone.
"There is the global financial crisis and the economy is not good. It is not easy to find a new job if we get unemployed," Ye said.
To ease concern of the 130 migrants, the trade union in Ye's company talked the company into avoiding lay-offs by offering jobs with a new project in Shenzhen.
As the negative impacts of the global financial crisis continued to surface, China is facing the growing pressure of migrant workers' employment.
However, not everyone was as lucky as Ye. According to government statistics, the global financial crisis has cost the jobs of more than 20 million rural migrants, or 15.3 percent of the 130 million migrants working outside their hometown.
Experts believed trade unions must do more to help and protect rural migrants as large scale of lay-offs would not only deter government efforts to increase farmers' income, but also threaten social stability.
The All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), which used to only organize workers with urban residence permits, is now giving more attention to recruiting and helping migrants.
To avoid labor dispute increase, trade unions have urged enterprises to pay migrant workers in time and in full. During the New Year Holiday and the Spring Festival, ACFTU helped claim 1.09 billion yuan (US$159.6 million) of back wages for 430,000 migrant workers.
Trade unions at all levels are also ramping up efforts to help return migrant workers to locate new jobs by providing them with training courses, small loans and guidance for job hunting.
According to the ACFTU, more than 66 million migrant workers have become trade union members by the end of 2008, and another 5 million would join this year.
"It's quite necessary to absorb migrant workers into trade unions," said Professor Wang Wei at the China National School of Administration, "We have to study every possible measure to organize, represent and protect this key component of workforce."
Migrant workers were a special social group born in China's social transition after the initiation of the reform and opening-up policy. "They have made great contribution to the country's economic growth but have not enjoyed the due rights. The crisis has exacerbated the problem," Wang said.
"Trade unions' effort will help migrant workers during the job market chill, but it is not enough and needs improvement," said Shi Fumao, director of Beijing Legal Aid Station for Migrant Workers.
Trade unions should also enhance migrant workers' knowledge of law and awareness of self-protection. "We must avoid the violations of migrants' interests instead of helping them after the violations," Shi said, "we cannot always act as firefighters."
(Xinhua News Agency February 16, 2009)
