Study On Economic Status And Institutional Improvement Of China’s Migrant Workers

Large-scale migrant workers are the blue-collar force for current development of China’s manufacturing and urban industries. Improving their economic status and concerned systems is related to these matters including China’s industrialization and urbanization, the transferring of rural labor, urban-rural integration, building a harmonious social as well as economic development pattern transformation. Migrant workers moving from countryside to work outside forms competitiveness for "Made in China", provided the vitality for the city, added impetus for the reform and opening up, created the endless driving force for industry bringing traction drive for agriculture, urban for rural areas, "first rich" for "after rich", and eventually realizing "common prosperity, which is the "Hercules" who promotes the balanced development of urban and rural areas.However, migrant workers used to be called as a "blind migrants", later called the "floating population", and now are known as the name of them. But no matter what they are called, as long as they are excluded from the existing cities’system, they will remain in the bottom of urban society, whose economic status of vulnerable groups in the society will not be changed. Everyone is concerned about the issues of migrant workers, and understands the seriousness and severity of the problems of their poor current economic status and institutional absent, who cannot deny that the majority of migrant workers in cities are unable to enjoy the rights and dignity equal to their contributions, and who has recognized that without the migrant workers suffer all disgrace and insults and actively participate in urban economic and social development there can be today’s achievements. However, the problems of economic status and institutional absent for migrant workers such as lack of the urban status, low treatment, poor living standards, restricted employment opportunities, monotonous way of life, poor living environment, no education and training, limited rights of discourse and the marginalization of social security state are objective and well known. Therefore, the study and resolution of the poor economic status of migrant workers and their institutional problems are the major practical problems that can not be avoided for the strategic plans of national implementation of building a harmonious society and achieving a comprehensive well-off, insisting "people oriented ", and creating justice and a balanced urban and rural development. Without the solutions to these problems, it is impossible to achieve the fairness and justice of human, social harmony and coordination of urban and rural areas, and it will deviate from the nature of mind and meaning which party stands for as "people-oriented ", as well as it becomes the situation of "rich people-oriented ", "elegant-oriented " and "city people-oriented". As a result, it is of great importance both in theoretical and practical level to carry out the economic status and institutional improvement of China’s migrant workers.In this study, the two major problems of the economic status of migrant workers and improvement of the system constitute the premise of mutual influence and dialectically unified. Comprehensive grasp of the reality of migrant workers’ economic status is the basis of improving the system of migrant workers, which is then the fundamental strategic initiative to improve the economic status of migrant workers. Although the overall structure of the paper is formed by the six chapters, the basic modules are actually only three parts of the theoretical groundwork, empirical analysis and strategic suggestions, each part of which is developed its own system.There are mainly four aspects discussed in the theoretical groundwork:First, on the basis of summing up the relevant conceptual understanding of domestic and foreign scholars, core concepts of the paper are clearly defined, which are migrant workers, the economic status of migrant workers and the system; Second, the domestic and foreign theoretic research development of migrant workers emerging, economic status of migrant workers and the social and economic systems directly related are serious combed; Third, the practices of system buildings for migrant workers abroad and the main policies for system construction of China’s migrant workers are briefly summed up; Fourth, the institutional reasons why economic status of migrant workers in China is poor are more profound analyzed.The first empirical study is to investigate 1638 samples of migrant workers in five districts and a sub-city of Guangzhou City which are of concentrated distribution and strong representation of employment categories according to the principle of stratified random sample, to better understand the situations of poor economic status and weak institution for the representatives of migrant workers of Guangzhou in China in the area of training and career, participating in social insurance, equity security, income and consumer spending and others.The second is to sum up the 13 major features of migrant workers’ economic status and the reality of economic system based on the individual, cross and other routine data analysis. These features are as follows:the problem of migrant workers being paid great attention by the Government and society, the self-feeling of public acceptance for migrant workers being still good, the education and skill certificate level being the key factors for the level of income of the migrant workers, their low income causing their consumption mainly on food, shelter and clothing and other basic expenses, the most concerned issues for them being the problems such as unemployment and disease, the main obstacle for employment being the high cost of working, working too hard and poor living conditions, to participate in vocational training being not satisfactory for them, little being known about the government policies, participating social security insurance being low, the relative lack of labor protection, working overtime and wage arrears unable to be ignored, seldom joining trade unions and poor labor contracts and government help being limited when encountering the difficulties.The third is to draw two major conclusions through the exploratory factor analysis. First, this paper summarized the "experience capital" for the migrant peasant workers including the items of age, the number of working times out, the aggregate working time and the number of cities worked, the "educational capital" for migrant workers including the items of education, expertise and skills, skill certificate, and the "human capital" which is constituted by the two capitals mentioned above; this paper summarized "other expenses" including health care, entertainment, dressing, communications fees, "housing food expenditures" including housing and food, "family expenditure "including sending money back home and paying their children’s education at home and " the balance expenditure " including balance, which together constitute the "consumer spending " for the migrant workers; this paper summarized " corporate nature "including corporate sector, corporate economic types, working categories, "business conditions" including trade unions, business labor protection, labor contracts, wage payment timeliness and " time schedule" include the rest periods and working time, which together constitute the "employment situation" for migrant workers. Second, this paper found that the income level of migrant workers are positively correlated with training, experience capital, education capital, corporate nature, business conditions, but negatively correlated with the rest time. And training, education capital, experience capital, corporate nature, business conditions and other variables positive correlate between each other, which indicate that there are interaction between these variables which are also jointly promote the improvement of income level.Followed by confirmatory factor analysis, this paper found that the elements such as the age, number of times to work, and the length of work time and the cities experienced to a large extent do determine the level of their experience capital; the elements such as education, skills certification and expertise do decide the education capital of migrant workers. But the highest path co-efficiency is certification, and the second is expertise, and the least is education. The expenditure of migrant workers is actually made up of the diet and housing spending, the household spending and other spending, and the path co-efficiency for items by each factor are higher. The corporate nature, business conditions and the time schedule do compromise the employment situation of migrant workers.Finally, through the full-factor model analysis on economic status of migrant workers, this paper concludes that the economic status of migrant workers is mainly compromised by the human capital, employment status, salary level, insurance and training, expenditure situation and time schedule, which all have a greater impact co-efficient; based on the exploratory and confirmatory analysis the summary of the final structural model of economic status of migrant workers has been made to fully and vividly show the economic status of migrant workers. Strategic studies include the following three main aspects:First, the strategic thinking is to propose the guiding ideology, strategic focus, the basic principles and initiatives to build the focus of improvement in economic status of migrant workers; Second, the institutional improvement framework is to propose "Five in One " system ideas of improving economic status of migrant workers in China, and to analyze and reveal the dialectical relationship between them, which is that training and education is the premise, the employment services the basis, the social security the core, the public service the target, the equity security the purpose; Third, the means of construction is to propose using integrated financial support policy, economic incentives and market competition, and fully mobilizing initiatives of the migrant workers themselves, the employers of migrant workers, community groups, industry associations and all levels of governments to build up the economic and social system for migrant workers combining training and education, employment services, social insurance, public services and rights protection as one with wide coverage, insuring basic, multi-channel, multi-level, multi-form, and sustainability.