On April 11, 2014, CIER successfully held 2014 First Quarterly Review of Employment in China at Room 347 of Qiushi Building, RUC. Deputy Director of Department of Employment and Income Distribution, National Development and Reform Commission Hu Deqiao, Deputy Director of Department of Employment Promotion of MHRSS Zhang Ying, Deputy Director of Department of Population and Employment Statistics Zhang Zhibin, Assistant to General Manager of Suzhou Industrial Park, Human Resources Development Co., LTD, Wu Xingyan, Director of Executive Office, Lin Min, Director of Career Services Center, Xia Hui attended the meeting at invitation. Dean of SLHR and Director of CIER, Professor Zeng Xiangquan, Director of Data Center of SLHR and CIER Researcher, Ding Dajian, and other research staff, Geng Lin, Ge Yuhao, Chen Xuan, etc., also participated in the meeting. The meeting was hosted by Professor Tang Kuang, Deputy Party Secretary of SLHR and Deputy Director of CIER.
Doctor Geng Lin, CIER associate researcher gave a speech entitled “Labor Market Prediction Based on CIER Index (July, 2008 to March, 2014)” To begin with, she reviewed domestic macroeconomic situation. Considering the latest economic indexes such as PMI, export, investment, consumption, etc., growth rate of domestic economy has gone down. With a series of policies boosting growth, domestic economy is expected to go up later. Doctor Geng Lin came to the following conclusions based on analysis of the trend and cycle of CIER Index, long-term prediction of the match between labor supply and demand, analysis of association between CIER monthly index and macroeconomic indicator, and predictive analysis on CIER index: (1) the sub-items of CIER are approximately associated with peaks and troughs of PMI, Practitioners index of manufacture industry in apparently negative direction; (2) the sub-item of CIER trend possibly reflected the long-term structural changes of labor market and the sub-item of CIER cycle reflected short-term volatility characteristics; (3) as can be seen from the long-term trend of CIER, the sub-item of CIER trend is going to drop continuously, but at a slower rate; (4) the sub-item of CIER cycle is going to go up as a result of weaker macro-economy in the first quarter of 2014; (5) the sub-item of CIER cycle is likely to go down with the implementation of economic stimulus policies in the second quarter; (6)taking seasonal factors into account, it is predicted that CIER index of April 2014 will be lower than that of March 2013.
CIER researcher Ding Dajian gave a speech entitled “The Analysis of 2014 First Quarter Chinese Employment Situation Based on the Internet Data from Zhaopin.com and Market Data of Suzhou Industrial Park”. To begin with, he gave a brief review of employment situation in the fourth quarter of 2013 and described the online recruitment data. Then he went into detailed analysis of employment situation of the first quarter, the reason why CIER index changed, the structural changes in market supply, the employment situations of different occupations, different regions (large and medium-sized cities), and different kinds and sizes of companies, and the labor market in a typical region (Suzhou Industrial Park). He believed that the changes of CIER index of the first quarter of 2014 had the following features: (1) CIER quarterly index has shown seasonal rebound. However, whether employment situation is going to reverse remains to been seen. (2)the recruiting demand went down rapidly, which was different from last few years’ record and reflected uncertainty of short-term economic situation; (3) The differences of competitive pressures of employment among industries and occupations became larger, which mainly reflected the impact of some institutional factors; (4) Inter-city and inter-regional competitive pressures of employment had no significant change, and the difference between east-central-west regions, first-tier and second-tier cities had no significant increase;(5) the competitive differences among different kinds of companies reflected job seekers’ pursuit for stable jobs.
Assistant to General Manager Wu Xingyan delivered a speech entitled "Report on the First Quarter of 2014 Human Resources Situation in Suzhou Industrial Park”. Firstly, she analyzed human resources index in the first quarter of 2014 and human resources market features. She found that: (1) In the first quarter, the demand index was higher than that of the same time in last year, which indicated positive economic perspective; (2) the supply index was a litter bit lower than that of the same time in last year, which made companies with large labor demand had difficulties in recruitment; (3) in the first quarter, the labor supply of the Park fell a little bit, while labor demand relatively increased, which resulted in decrease of the total match index. She then analyzed the human resources market features and labor usage of workers at production line and found that: (1) the turnover rate was general low in the first quarter; (2) affected by amendment of The labor contract law of the People's Republic of China, companies continuously decreased the use of contract labors; (3) the Park further speeded up transformation and upgrading and professional talents has become the key of talent introduction, which made up 50% of labor demand; (4) companies encouraged workers at production line to come back after Spring Festival by using policies such as beginning holiday early, granting opening red pockets, etc., which raised attendance rate; (5) salaries of worker at production line were higher than that of last year, especially for skilled workers, who had a salary increase of 15.1%, which indicated that the Park had huge demand on skilled workers. At last, she made predictions of human resource situation in the second quarter of 2014: (1) labor demand as a whole will go up; (2) high-tech industry will have large demand on current year's graduates.
After that, associate professor Ge Yuhao gave a report entitle “The Effect of Putting off Retirement on Youth Employment”. He discussed the following issues using classic economic theories and relevant research results worldwide: (1) how many elderly employment will be created by putting off retirement; (2) how employment structure will be influenced by putting off retirement; (3) the relationship between the number of elderly employment and youth employment; (4) the relationship between the employment structure of elderly people and young people. He believed that: (1) elderly working population will go up with putting off retirement, while the range will significantly lower than the expectation of policy maker; (2) elderly people with higher education or with positions in governments, state-owned enterprises and institutions will be more likely to stay in labor market; (3) elderly people and young people are substitutes in labor market; in the short-term, putting off retirement will cause negative influence on the number of youth employment and intensify structural contradiction of labor market; in the long-term, with salary(labor cost) adjustment, in country-uniformed and perfect competition labor market, putting off retirement will no longer cause negative influence on youth employment.
Professor Tang Kuang reported on “Assessment of 2013 Labor Relations Situation and Prediction of 2014”. He pointed out：(1) the labor relation in our country is market-oriented, law-regulated and diversified; (2) migrant workers and medium and small size companies are the main part of labor market; (3) the labor dispatching proportion of our country is higher than that of main countries worldwide; (4) labor disputes are going up; (5) mediation of labor disputes is completed mainly by townships; (6) the quality of basic mediation staff need to be improved. He looked into labor relations in 2014 and indicated: (1) the employment situation will be stable and labor relations will focus on the quality of employment; (2) labor dispatching will gradually be replaced by other forms of employment; (3) tripartite coordination mechanism will further play its role; (4) the advantages of collective labor contract will be further investigated.
After that, in the free talk period, the Deputy Director Hu Deqiao, Zhang Ying, Zhang Zhibin and so on spoke highly of the seminar for the efforts of our researchers and exchanged their own viewpoints with the experts based on the new policies of Central Government.
Finally, Dean Zeng made a summary of the meeting. He believed that the structural contradiction of Chinese labor market remains unoptimistic and future labor market research should focus on labor supply and the quality of talent cultivation. At last, he gave thanks to the support and efforts of the government, enterprises and the academia to the quarterly employment analysis conference. He hoped that all sides would further enhance communication cross border. |
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