labor - Shortages: different takes on the development

Monday morning and more news and discussions on the shortage on the Chinese labor market that has been hitting the headlines in yesterday's Chinabiz and the China Daily. ""Nearly 90 percent of the factories in Dongguan are in dire need of workers, so I came to Guangzhou, once the shrine for millions of migrant workers from China's vast countryside," said Zhang Zhichun, an employee with a labor service agency of Dongguan, a city of South China's Guangdong Province in the China Daily.
Not everybody agrees with one of the reasons mentioned in Chinabiz, that the improved prices for agricultural products add to the pressure of migrant workers to stay at home. "Government propaganda," said one of my colleagues this morning. He thinks - and that is certainly an additional reason - that the fast rise in demand for labor is more important.
"This year's labor force market of the Pearl River Delta presents the characteristics of what experts decribe as an olive shape: the demand for workers with advanced techniques and rich experiences and that for manual workers able to do heavy physical labor are great while the demand for general workers is basically saturated," says the China Daily.
"Now traditional labor-intensive industries including those making clothes, shoes, toys, furniture, machinery are being discarded by migrant workers as businesses with better working conditions and higher income, such as electronic factories, have become their first preference when seeking a job," said Liu Qiusheng, executive vice director of the Taiwan Merchant Association of Shenzhen.