NYT : 中国で労働力不足が発生している


Help Wanted: China Finds Itself With a Labor Shortage By JIM YARDLEY and DAVID BARBOZA Published: April 3, 2005
何事も直線的には進まないものだ。過去の延長線で考えていると、間違うかも。

抜粋：
  1. The world's most populous nation, which has powered its stunning economic rise with a cheap and supposedly bottomless pool of migrant labor, is experiencing shortages of about two million workers in Guangdong and Fujian, the two provinces at the heart of China's export-driven economy.
  2. For Wu Dongshan, the job placement coordinator at Hunan Top, the most obvious sign of change is that factory recruiters now come to him, a reversal from three years ago, when he would make the long drive to Guangdong with busloads of students desperate for work.
  3. No one thinks China is running out of workers. But young migrant workers coveted by factories are gaining bargaining power and many are choosing to leave the low pay and often miserable conditions in Guangdong. In a nondemocratic China, it is the equivalent of "voting with their feet."
  4. "It's not the end of the great China manufacturing story," said Jonathan Anderson, the chief Asia-Pacific economist for UBS. "But you're no longer going to be talking about China having labor so radically cheap that it will capture all the investment flows. This is an opening for Vietnam, it's an opening for India and Cambodia."
  5. The shift, which experts say will happen gradually, began last year and is a result of two decades of strict family planning, which has made China one of the most rapidly aging countries in the world.
  6. "The number of people in the labor force is going to be going down for the next 15 years," said Dali Yang, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. "This is a shift in demographics that is really good, not just for salaries but for work conditions."
  7. "Most of these families have only one child because of family planning," Mr. Wu said. "They don't want their child to be far away from home."

中国の豊富な労働力をあてにして、何とかやってきた日本経済にも、影響が出てくることも考えられる。



Posted: Mon - April 4, 2005 at 12:03 PM           |  

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