This is protectionism of another sort: Some cities, in the thick of a most dangerous economic crisis across the world, are trying to protect the local jobs at the expense of job market equality.

It would be a mistake if national trade unions and the central government's labor authorities fail to act promptly to halt the toxic tendency among some relatively affluent cities to try to shield their local job markets from the migrant workers.

According to central government data, up to 20 million migrant workers have lost their urban jobs.

Although more than 60 percent of the urban companies do have new recruitment plans after the Chinese Lunar New Year, the job slots available are around 20 percent fewer than in the same period last year.

Leaders in the more industrial cities along the Chinese coast should shoulder their responsibility by keeping their doors open to migrant workers.

Shanghai may be setting a bad example. It was reported last week, by Shanghai Evening News and other sources, that this richest city of China is ready to "persuade" migrant workers who cannot secure jobs in Shanghai to go back to their home villages.

Some unidentified "responsible person" from the office of the so-called municipal "joint conference on the work on rural workers" said that migrant workers who have indeed failed to find jobs in Shanghai will be persuaded to go back to their hometowns to take job trainings or to become entrepreneurs.

When reporting about the Shanghai move, an online information site, www.hsw.cn, even said Shanghai shouldn't be shy about using the phrase of "persuading to go back" in these difficult times, saying it is a better, and more responsible, policy, than leaving the migrant workers wandering about blindly in the cities.

This is nonsense. Let's imagine what those Shanghai immigrants in Japan would say if the host government decided to persuade them to go back to their hometown.

Shanghai's celebrated persuasion scheme has left many questions unanswered, for example:

Who is there to decide whether a migrant worker can or cannot hold a job in Shanghai?

Who has the constitutional right to do the persuasion and the subsequent "sending back" of migrants?

Where is the legal help if a migrant worker does not agree with the authorities' decision?

What is the procedure for the authorities to evaluate a migrant worker's chance in getting a job to support himself or herself in Shanghai?

Why shouldn't the municipal government offer its guest workers and their family members more generous training programs?

How can this large, richest city be not ashamed of itself by trying to shift the responsibility of migrant workers' training, and the expenses involved, to the less-developed rural provinces?

I tend to regard Shanghai's persuasion of the migrant workers as of a similar nature with the "Buy American" slogan.

One telling example is the difference between Shanghai's taxi service, an industry entirely reserved for local drivers, and the taxi service in the south China city of Guangzhou, where most cab drivers are migrant workers, many from the landlocked central China provinces of Hunan and Henan.

In protected Shanghai, taxis are expensive and hard to come by in many downtown streets in rush hours, while in the more open Guangzhou, taxis are cheap and easier to get.

To find out where all the cab drivers are from is a very useful gauge to measure the openness of one city's job market. Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and their surrounding Guangdong province, are the only places that keep the most open labor policies in China.

Rather than sending migrant workers home (I cannot figure out how this is possible without using disciplinary forces), Shanghai and all the cities with closed job markets should be persuaded, if not be ordered by Beijing, to drop their discriminatory and unconstitutional job policies.

One does recognize some improvement in Shanghai's growth, however slow, in a cosmopolitan culture. The Shanghai Evening News did carry one criticism of the local persuasion policy - although it is a reprint from a newspaper in distant Hunan province.

E-mail:younuo@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily February 9, 2009)