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Chinese lawmakers attending the on-going annual national
legislature session have urged the government to pay more attention
to the sharp shortage of well-trained workers and technicians, or
"senior blue-collars," to boost the manufacturing industry, which
has provided the world market with an increasing number of
"made-in-China" products.
Senior workers merely account for 3.5 percent of China's 70 million
industrial workers, compared with the average of 40 percent in
developed countries.
The lack of skillful workers and technicians has hampered the
development of the manufacturing and processing industries, and the
problem has becoming even more protruding after China's entry into
the World Trade Organization.
Currently, China has some 1 million technicians and senior
technicians, but many of them are old, and there is an urgent need
for a large number of senior blue-collars to meet the requirements
of a booming manufacturing industry in the country, said Xiong
Shengwen, a deputy to the National People's Congress (NPC), the top
legislature of China.
Sun Jusheng, a NPC deputy and vice-director of the Jiangxi
Provincial Statistics Bureau, said 63 percent of the 44 industrial
enterprises in the provincial capital, Nanchang, are badly in need
of senior workers. The situation is almost the same in such
industrial cities as Shanghai, Wuhan and Taiyuan.
Statistics show that China now needs 600,000 operators of numerical
control machine tools. Experts say the demand for skillful workers
in China is expected to grow by 25 percent in the next few years,
with that for technicians and senior technicians being doubled.
China's Ministry of Labor and Social Security launched last October
a national program to train highly skilled workers and technicians,
aiming at increasing the proportion of senior workers, technicians
and senior technicians to the total number of skillful workers by
3-5 percentage points in 3-5 years.
Meanwhile, an increasing number of enterprises have begun to raise
the pay to senior workers and technicians, in an effort to keep a
stable army of blue-collars. In the First Automobile Works Group,
for instance, highly skillful workers are paid the same as
engineers or managers.
(People's Daily March 10, 2003)
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