A Study On The Influencing Factors Of Migrant Workers' Employment Status Choice

In Beijing’s labor market, there is the extremely large number of migrant workers, migrant workers have become an essential part of Beijing and they have made a significant contribution to the construction, daily operation and economic development of the city. Because migrant workers who come from across the country have different personal characteristics, family background and job mobility experience, so they have different employment status choice. Studies have found that migrant workers tend to get more and enhance the professional class through self-employed, which means self-employed has become more and more important for the migrant workers’ survival and development. In this paper, my research is based on the 2013 floating population monitoring data of Beijing. Firstly, it describes the current employment situation of migrant workers, and summarizes the characteristics of their employment, which includes employment concentrated in labor- intensive industries, long working hours and lack of serious kinds of insurance, employment income is much lower than the city average and a considerable number of migrant workers choose self-employed. Through further research we found that migrant workers who have different age and different level of education are obviously different in these employment characteristics. Secondly, it finds that migrant workers, who are different in gender, age and education, behave quite differently in the choice of employment status. In addition, migrant workers’ current employment situation is also different just because they have chosen different employment status, the main difference is that the self-employed work more concentrated in certain industries than employed people, employee’s employment situation is more standardized than the others, the income of the self-employed is significantly higher than employee, the self-employed who don’t hire others are working in a relatively poor situation. Finally, it uses the multinomial logistic regression model to analysis the influence factors which are influencing the choice of migrant workers’ employment status. The results show that the male, married, migrant workers from central regions become more likely to be the self-employed, whether they hire other. At the same time, the experienced old migrant workers who have worked in here much more years can better adapt to the labor market, they were also more likely to become the self-employed. On the other hand, prior years of education to a certain extent, increasing of education years significantly enhance the possibility of becoming the self-employed, and after years of education to a certain extent, migrant workers who have longer education years tend to choose the more formal employment to achieve their own development. In addition, supports from their families also affect the employment status choice of migrant workers.