Project description

Title: Reintegration of Unemployed Women into Working Life
Client: Bundesministerium für Wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung (BMZ)
Country: China
Lead executing agency: Ministry of Labour and Social Order of the PR China
Overall term: April 1999 to July 2006

Context

The reform of China’s economic and social structures, aimed at better integration into the global economy, have led to massive upheavals in the labour market. Some 20 percent of the workforce are unemployed: 130 million people. Although the situation on the labour market in the coastal regions of the east and in some metropolitan areas is comparatively good, unemployment in the poorer western areas and in the old industrial regions of the north-east is all the worse. Thus 10 million people a year leave these areas for the cities. Although workers are needed there, neither those coming from the rural regions nor the inhabitants of the cities, who themselves have lost their jobs, possess the qualifications required to fill positions in the fast-growing service sector, which is constantly gaining importance.

This problem has more severe impacts on women than on men. They not only lost their jobs faster in the 1990s, they also have had more difficulty in finding new ones. They tend to be relegated to lower-paying jobs, where they remain, with little training and hardly any social security.

This poses great challenges for the state, the society and the private sector. Instead of recruiting, as in the past, the largest possible number of unskilled workers, a forward-looking labour market policy must now push on with the large-scale training of workers in accordance with the needs of a modern economic structure.

This project is working to reform the labour market policy in Nanjing (Jiangsu Province) and in Benxi (Liaoning Province), a city characterised by outdated heavy industry.

Objective

The local employment office and other important labour market actors in the Nanjing area have a strategy for dealing with the growing unemployment among women. As a result, more and more women are finding employment or are now self-employed. Women are proportionately well represented at all levels of training and in all vocational fields and are no longer forced into certain categories of work.

The lessons learned in Nanjing have been successfully transferred to Benxi and adapted to the local situation there.

The experience gained and results of the project are documented and are available throughout the country.

Approach

Together with local partners, the project is developing concepts for vocational counselling, training and upgrading of workers, business start-ups, and flexible forms of employment such as temporary work. 
In this connection, employment office staff must adopt an up-to-date client orientation. From now on, statistics must be suited to monitoring and steering of the reforms, meaning that employment office personnel have to develop a new perception of statistics as a tool. Gender awareness is being raised. 

Increasingly, private sector institutions must be involved in formulating and implementing labour market policy, which must be interpreted and established - unlike in the past - as an area of policy parallel to regional economic development.

All concepts are tested in practice and the knowledge gained is systematically analysed and documented.  Successful procedures, instruments and organisational models are transferred gradually to the employment offices in Nanjing and Benxi and then made known throughout the whole country.

Results achieved so far

Through numerous incentives for the employment of women, which the project played a part in developing, the percentage of unemployed women in Nanjing has fallen, as has the total number of unemployed. The instruments and procedures used have proved their worth and are already in common use beyond the project’s sphere of direct influence.

The employment offices’ former strongly paternalistic attitude toward work has changed appreciably. The staff approach the situation of the jobless person more individually and take the respective qualifications needed into particular consideration when counselling. The unemployed and employer are now clients of the employment office and are treated as such. The new form of vocational counselling and targeted training and upgrading for the jobless have led to a great increase in successful placements. Work relationships are terminated less frequently and have become more secure.

An effective labour market policy is now regarded by all actors as an indispensable prerequisite for  positive economic development. The instruments and procedures used are gradually being oriented more and more to the needs of the market.

A particular success for the project is the establishment of a model for “socially acceptable temporary employment”. In Nanjing, a regular boom has taken place in temporary employment agencies: in 2002, two companies took the first steps in this direction with the help of the project: in 2006, there will be over 200 agencies for temporary employment. Of these, 30 have come together - also at the suggestion of the project - to form a trade association and have pledged to follow the principle of social acceptability. These companies alone employ and advise over 70,000 temporary workers. As a tool, temporary employment fits so well into the current economic transition phase that it has also met with great interest elsewhere and increasingly has been put into practice. While employers profit from its flexibility, employees enjoy the legality of their work contracts, social security and dependable wage payments.

Because the economy in the Benxi region is still far more strongly oriented towards state control, although the instruments and procedures developed in Nanjing were in fact transferred and modified to suit the local conditions, it has not yet been possible to trigger off the desired change processes. Precisely in the areas of obsolete heavy industry, however, a thoroughgoing interlinkage of labour market policy and economic policy is urgently called for. Particularly the private sector in the region would welcome this, but state authorities remain reserved.
By means of public relations work that is in part unconventional, and many activities to raise gender awareness, deep-rooted gender stereotypes have been successfully called into question. The alteration of the general perception of this issue is a long way from complete, but the project has succeeded in launching the relevant public debate and increasing receptiveness to new ideas.

Further information

• Local website of this project
  www.njlss.gov.cn/zdxm/zdxm.jsp