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Workers return to bleak future in China export hub
Wed Feb 4, 2009 12:26am EST
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By James Pomfret
DONGGUAN, China (Reuters) - Train and bus stations in China's southern export hub are swollen with migrant workers returning from their annual holiday -- but the signs are not good for many hoping to find their factory open or seeking new jobs.
Fixated on social stability, China's ruling Communist Party is watching closely what happens in the Pearl River Delta, where thousands of factories have closed or slashed work forces because of a slump in export orders.
"How can I be optimistic?" asked Xie Fuyuan, a square-jawed job seeker, hauling two bundles of belongings at the bus station in Changan, one of the many towns in this wedge of Guangdong province where belching factories have replaced rice fields.
Xie said he had spent the past week trawling the streets of several factory towns in a door-to-door approach favored by poorer workers unable to afford rising fees at job centers.
"Before, as long as you showed up you could get a job. But this year it's not possible," said the muscular, 26-year-old Xie.
The competition for once-plentiful factory jobs is heating up among migrant workers, raising the risk of social tensions as millions arrive from distant villages after the Lunar New Year break, despite bleak employment prospects.
For the past three decades, the factory zones of coastal China have offered an escape from harsh and poor-paying farmwork for many millions of rural migrants. The industrial work can be tough and dangerous, with long hours for meager wages. But now even that passageway from rural poverty is shrinking.
Xie, who hails from a poor mountain village in western Guangdong province once earned around 1,200 yuan ($175) a month in a toy factory, which he used to support his family back home.
Now down to his last few hundred yuan, he says he can only afford to hold out for another three days.
WORKERS NOT DETERRED
About 20 million Chinese rural migrant workers -- or some 15 percent of the country's total -- have lost their jobs as the nation's growth has faltered under a global economic slump.
But these bleak numbers will not deter millions of migrants from crowding trains and buses to travel thousands of kilometers to try their luck in export hubs such as Guangdong, Fujian and the Yangtze River Delta.
Dragging two suitcases in a wobbly line while jostled by migrant workers spilling from trains at Dongguan's East Railway Station, Hu Mengmeng, 25, said she was determined to find fresh work after losing her previous job before the Chinese New Year.
"I wanted to come back early this year to find a better job," said the chirpy factory girl after a day's journey from her village in central Hubei province to Dongguan, a hub for foreign-invested factories that have been hard-hit by shriveling demand for China-made goods.
"I heard many people say that due to the financial crisis, it's difficult to find a job anywhere," she added, before heading to a huge bus terminal where touts herded workers onto buses bound for numerous smoggy factory towns spread across the delta. Continued...
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