Research On Migrant Workers' Willingness Of Occupational Mobility And The Influencing Factors In Construction Industry In Hangzhou

Ever since the late seventies last century, millions of companies, especially the labor-intensive ones in the coastal area have been the first beneficiaries from China's reform and opening, and during the thriving process, thousands and millions of peasants have been attracted by numerous job opportunities, thus forming the impressive movement of migrant workers. Labors, from countryside to modern coastal cities, create huge wealth, alleviate to some extent problem of overabundant rural labors and also play a critical part in integrating urban and rural areas. China, known to the world as a country never short of labor resources, remains developing at a skyrocket speed. However, year2003was a vague turning point in labor supply, that is, coastal areas experienced the labor shortage for the first time, and later this problem calls on coastal areas annually and nowadays global financial crisis has even worsened the problem in2009. The phenomenon of labor shortage spreads all over the nation. Though researchers argue that the total amount of surplus rural labor is not decreasing, where have the abundant labor gone? What are the reasons behind rural labors'job choices that cause shortage and high rate of turnover? What are the measures to resolve the shortage?Among the developed coastal cities, Hangzhou is one of the popular destinations of migrant workers, since its industries, especially the labor-intensive construction industry, are growing fast, creating a large number of job opportunities and demanding huge amount of labors. With the outburst of national-wide labor shortage problem, construction industry is also forced to deal with shortage of both skilled and common laborers, along with the pressure of ever-rising labor costs.This paper chooses construction industry in Hangzhou as a representative, seeking for answer through desk and field research. The paper contains two main parts, firstly, data and information about the general status of construction industry in Hangzhou from statistical yearbook, professional reports and detailed information collected from five interviewed construction companies; secondly, descriptive and empirical research on migrant workers'willingness of occupational mobility, i.e. whether to remain staying in construction industry, which is based on the face-to-face questionnaires filled out by migrant workers who are now working in the construction industry. The questionnaire comprises mainly five categories of questions, concerning interviewees'personal, family, working, skill features and choice of district.The paper is divided into six chapters. The first two chapters introduce the labor issues and summarize related classic and domestic literatures about career choice of rural labors respectively. Chapter Three discusses generally about the situation of construction industry in Hangzhou and describes the company interviews in details. Chapter Four and Five focuses on the field research on construction workers' willingness, firstly cross-analyzing the relationship between explanatory variables of five categories and the dependent variable, job choice, later using Chi-square method to select influential factors and then Binary Logistic Regression to examine the influence of selected factors on workers" willingness of occupational mobility. Chapter Six is a summary of the research results and further propositions to help retain labor and ease the tension of labor shortage.