Overseas crazy robbery of Chinese blue-collar workers, migrant workers have finally come out?

Wisdom Valley Trends

2024-05-27 14:27Published in Chief Wealth Advisor of Guangdong New Middle School

◎Author | Summer insects

China is staging an unprecedented "blue-collar shortage".

Looking inward, under the severe shortage of supply, the income of "blue-collar" workers is soaring, catching up with white-collar workers.

According to the 2023 China Blue-Collar Employment Research Report, blue-collar incomes have increased by as much as 225% over the past decade, while white-collar workers have increased by 30%, which is only a quarter of that of blue-collar workers.

Looking outward, many overseas places are crazy to grab Chinese laborers——

In response to the aging population, Japan will bring in a record 820,000 foreign workers this year. Sixty-six percent of its high-end foreign talent is from China.

South Korea, which is haunted by the "curse of the last one", has a serious shortage of front-line production workers, and will also expand the number of foreign workers to 165,000 this year in a record.

……

Under the domestic and foreign difficulties, China can no longer sit still:

The country is in a hurry, desperately developing vocational undergraduates, making blue-collar workers "gold-plated", and increasing the attraction of talents;

The local government is in a hurry, and desperately "sinks the higher vocational resources to the county", locks in the source of students in advance, and forms a closed loop of education and employment......

In the future, China's blue-collar workers will move towards middle-class, high-literacy, and globalization, while a large number of oversupplied "low-end white-collar workers" may enter the twilight of employment.

An employment reshuffle that is related to the future and fate of countless people is being staged.

The era of China's blue-collar workers is coming!

Blue-collar workers staged the "myth of getting rich"

Today's Chinese blue-collar workers are no longer the "dirty, tired, poor" of the past, but are increasingly evolving into an unattainable existence.

When some white-collar workers ridicule themselves as "new poor", "work in glamorous CBD office buildings during the day, and pour into urban villages that don't see the light of day at night", with a bright surface and a monthly salary of 3,000, they have become the object of many people's complaints-

The various "myths of getting rich" concocted by blue-collar workers in recent years have attracted more and more young people.

The monthly income of x 10,000 has become a new label for some blue-collar occupations

From a mason's monthly income of 25,000 yuan, to nearly 100 Jingdong Express brothers' annual income of more than one million in three years, and then to a monthly salary of 10,000 yuan is difficult to find......

More and more vivid cases are emerging, teasing the sensitive nerves of job seekers.

According to the Q1 2024 Recruitment and Salary Report of Chinese Enterprises released by Zhaopin, a total of 51.9% of the surveyed professionals are willing ("very willing" and "somewhat willing") to choose blue-collar jobs, which is more than half.

This willingness is even more vividly reflected in the younger generation.

According to statistics in 2023, the willingness of post-00s people to join blue-collar workers is significantly higher than that of other age groups, reaching 61.5%.

In addition to the increased willingness, many young people have put it into practice, shouting "take off the long shirt", rolling up their sleeves and opening up another world.

Among the college students who graduated as early as last summer, 8.1% joined the manufacturing and processing industry, automobile production and other industries. Although the share is still not large, it has increased from 6.1% in the previous year, and has already demonstrated the subtle attitude of young people towards employment.

Being a blue-collar worker is another way out for college students

In the past, economist Li Yining described it as a "dual labor market", where the status of white-collar workers and blue-collar workers of inferior workers was faintly exchanged.

The logic of employment is being subverted.

The labor force is starting to run out of people

Behind these new employment trends, it is inseparable from a big promoter of the times-

Population form.

With the disappearance of the demographic dividend and the arrival of the "Lewis inflection point", the labor force of both China and many countries around the world has entered the stage of limited supply from unlimited supply.

The "Lewis inflection point" here is an economic concept that refers to an important inflection point in the process of industrialization, when the rural population as a labor force flocks to the cities, gradually changing from surplus to shortage.

To put it simply, the villagers who are waiting in line for work are no longer enough.

And here comes the question -

When there is a shortage in the total amount, why do a large number of young people can't help but snort coldly when looking for jobs, "There are still too many Chinese"?

The reason for this is the imbalance of supply.

Over the past 20 years, China has worked tirelessly to popularize higher education, and countless young people have sharpened their heads and drilled into higher education institutions.

The gross enrolment ratio in tertiary education has soared from 1.55% in 1978 to 60.2% in 2023, which means that more than 60% of the entire 18-22-year-old population can be called "college students".

With both directions, the scale of China's "white-collar reserves" has reached the point of approaching saturation, so much so that the job market once lit up a red light.

Nearly half of the college students who graduated this year have no place to go after graduation

"More things are cheaper", how can it not be put in the job market?

As the popular saying goes, "You may be golden, but here you are golden."

According to Caixin data, according to the number of births, college graduates will swell in the next 15 years or so, peaking between 2038 and 2040.

This means that in the next 15 years, there will be an even larger influx of incremental white-collar reservists to carve up the already small stock of the job market.

On the other hand, the supply of blue-collar workers has been constrained by bottlenecks.

According to the Research Report on the Employment of Blue-Collar Workers in China (2022), in recent years, the recruitment ratio of skilled workers in mainland China has exceeded 1.5, that is, there are only 100 job seekers for every 150 positions, and the recruitment ratio of senior technicians has even reached more than 2, with a gap of up to 10 million.

The tide of difficulty in recruiting workers has swept all over the country in recent years, and the strange scene of "bosses lining up for workers to pick" is not surprising.

Another set of data is that the mainland's skilled talents account for less than 30% of the employed people, compared with Germany, Japan and other manufacturing powerhouses can reach 70% to 80%, the gap is still relatively large.

"Rare things are expensive", the same applies here.

While the existing employment reserve continues to flock to white-collar workers, the demand for blue-collar workers in society is actually increasing.

With the growth of white-collar workers, people's demand for service-oriented people is also rising rapidly - physiotherapists, confinement nannies, family companions, maintenance workers, and skilled barbers......

"I'm looking for a monthly salary of 20,000 yuan with a monthly salary of 9,000 to serve me." New Weekly has reported that 996 has an excessive monthly salary of 9,000 white-collar workers, and the physiotherapists they find have a monthly salary of 2-30,000 yuan, and an hourly salary of 200-300.

Under the imbalance between supply and demand, the blue-collar labor market is more advantageous, and wages will eventually continue to rise.

This is the deep-seated reason why prices have skyrocketed in recent years in places where manpower is needed. In addition to not being able to raise the price themselves, white-collar workers will also face the inevitable rise in the cost of living in the future, which can be described as internal and external difficulties.

But this is the inevitable law of social development, and no one can hide under the general trend.

The world's crazy rush for "blue collars"

It is no secret that in overseas developed countries and regions, the salaries of blue-collar and white-collar workers are equal, or even higher.

@谷雨数据指出, in the United States, the demand for blue-collar jobs has been rising since the beginning of the 20th century;

According to Statistics Canada, the average hourly wage for jobs such as gas workers, auto mechanics, welders in British Columbia (e.g., Vancouver) is higher than that of office workers, at more than 150 yuan.

Cao Dewang, the glass king, also said that when he opened a factory in the United States, natural gas, water and electricity bills, material costs, including tax payments, were cheap, but they were just as expensive - labor.

Among them, the salary of white-collar workers in the office is three or four times that of China, and the salary of blue-collar workers in factories is eight times that of China.

In this context, the "blue collars" from China and India, which are large labor countries, have also become the target of global frenzied grabbing. For example, India has signed a memorandum of understanding on labor cooperation with 16 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Australia, Sweden and Finland, and will export 3.7 million workers in the future.

A large number of Chinese blue-collar workers, as a freely allocated "market resource", spontaneously flow to areas with higher salaries.

In South Korea, the Chosun Ilbo predicts that the number of foreign workers will exceed 1 million for the first time by 2024, with the highest proportion of Chinese workers.

In Japan, about 2.04 million foreign workers were announced in October 2023, of which Chinese ranked second, approaching 400,000.

Japan will further open its doors to international workers.

The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and others estimate that 6.74 million foreign workers will be needed to achieve the average annual growth target of 1.24% by 2040.

A global blue-collar battle without gunpowder is already surging.

China's blue-collar workers are also likely to further accelerate mobility towards an international labor market.

China desperately cultivates "blue-collar workers"

At present, cultivating and retaining blue-collar talents has become a major event related to the country's fortune and people's livelihood and industrial upgrading.

When the overseas siphon force is getting stronger and stronger, China has also used the power of the wilderness, and one of the big moves is to promote vocational undergraduate education, so that blue-collar workers can also become intellectuals.

Wuhan Polytechnic University, Jinhua Polytechnic University, Henan Luohe Food Engineering Vocational University, Qinghai Polytechnic University, Suzhou Polytechnic University...... The Ministry of Education issued a public announcement on the 15th, proposing to agree to set up 13 public vocational undergraduate colleges.

If we add the first batch of 12 newly established colleges and universities that have been registered in 2024 announced by the Ministry of Education on March 13, the number of newly established undergraduate and junior colleges approved by the Ministry of Education this year has reached 45.

The emergence of vocational undergraduates in batches has enriched the possibility of upward mobility of blue-collar workers.

Upgrading from a stigmatized technical school student to a college student is a slap in the face in East Asian society.

Cao Dewang, who is approaching his eighties, has spent 10 billion yuan to help solve the problem of disconnection of application-oriented and technical-skilled talents in China's manufacturing industry, and plans to carry out the first batch of enrollment this year.

Locally, there are also frequent actions. Taking the Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions, where vocational education is at the forefront, as an example, higher education resources are "sinking to the county", and it is a logical path to carry out the "regional middle and higher vocational integration talent training reform" and "five-year higher vocational system".

Hangzhou Vocational Institute cooperates with Pinghu Vocational Secondary School to explore the model of "industrial college";

Hangzhou Fuyang District Vocational High School explores the school-running model of "industrial college + enterprise school district";

Zhejiang Vocational and Technical College of Industry and Commerce cooperated with Ningbo Xingzhi Secondary Vocational School to establish Cixi College;

The Institute plans to cooperate with Yongkang Vocational and Technical School to establish a hardware manufacturing industry college......

This kind of cultivation and employment are directly counterparted, and the practice of producing blue-collar workers in batches may give birth to a large number of "county middle class", which will go hand in hand with "county ladies" and become the mainstay of small cities.

In addition, the middle-class development of blue-collar workers is reflected in the clever transformation of the "soft environment" -

In the past two years, some Chinese conscientious private entrepreneurs, represented by Yu Donglai, are tirelessly "exploding" blue-collar treatment.

For example, Yu Donglai, who is talked about by people, blew up and changed BBK in Changsha, Hunan, and did two things:

The first is to increase the salary of all employees, with an increase of up to 30% (the salary of employees is at least 4,000 yuan, and the monthly salary of the store manager is 20,000 yuan);

The second is to shorten the working hours, to the fat east to see, the business hours are shortened to 9:30 to 21:30.

The most interesting thing is that after Fat Donglai renovated the Jiabaile Wanli store, the average daily sales rose from more than 100,000 yuan to about 500,000 yuan.

The appearance of Fat Donglai also let China's 350 million service industry practitioners know——

Treating employees as human beings can also be a business principle; It turns out that it is not a luxury to let employees go to work with dignity; As a blue-collar worker, you don't have to be quiet.

epilogue

From the official to the non-governmental, from the cultivation channel to the soft environment, China's all-out support strategy has ushered in its own era for blue-collar workers.

Globalization, intellectualization, and gentrification are not extravagant expectations.

Under this reshuffle, the fate of countless families will enter another channel.

In that channel of possibility, even if you are a different "gold", you can still shine.

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