国内英语新闻:Coastal businesses already worry about post-holiday worker scarcity

HANGZHOU, Feb. 13 (Xinhua) -- Days before its 4,000 employees, mostly migrants, started off upon their annual trips home for the Chinese Lunar New Year, Tiansheng Group, a textile company in the eastern Zhejiang Province, promised pay rises hoping workers would all come back after the holiday.

"We are expecting a severe shortage of skilled workers this year," said Wei Guoliang, president of the company's trade union. "We'll be short of at least 1,000 workers in Spring."

Lu Laofa (R), a 40-year-old migrant worker from southwest China's Guizhou Province, and his children make a free phone call with their relatives at the railway station of Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, Jan. 31, 2010

Located in Shaoxing County, Asia's biggest textile base, Tiansheng Group relies mostly on migrant workers from Anhui, Henan and Sichuan provinces for production.

Fearing it might lose some of its best employees, the company's management offered an average 15-percent pay rise for all workers, plus higher meal allowances and better medical insurance starting on March 1.

The offer was printed out and posted at the company's main entrance to catch the workers' attention.

"We don't know if it will work," said Wei. "But we do hope the workers will come back after the Spring Festival."

Two farmer migrant workers who returned home for the Spring Festival take part in a lathe-hand technical training at Juye County, east China's Shandong Province, Feb. 5, 2010.

While the Spring Festival falls Sunday, most migrants would stay home for about two weeks for the most important Chinese holiday.

For years, migrant workers are the mainstay of labor forces in China's leading manufacturing bases in the Shanghai-centered Yangtze River Delta and the Guangzhou-centered Pearl River Delta.

Yiwu City in Zhejiang Province, known for its small commodities including the world's biggest supply of toys and Christmas gifts, is also feeling the pinch of worker scarcity.

After a recruitment tour to underdeveloped western provinces of Guizhou, Shaanxi and Yunnan last year, Huang Yunlong, head of the city's labor management bureau, said the situation would be tough for local employers this year.

Migrant workers gesture on their chartered flight at the airport in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, Feb. 4, 2010

In a recent survey in Lishui, a manufacturing town close to Yiwu, 4,000 of the 6,000 migrants who were heading home for the new year said they would stay in their hometowns for jobs or do farmwork after the holiday.

Hoping to ease the labor shortage, Red Leaf Umbrella Co. encourages its employees to introduce new workers and offers a 600 yuan cash reward for each new recruit.

"The worker shortage is a result of the fast economic recovery, as well as the new policies by central and local governments to stimulate growth in the central and western regions," said Zhuo Yongliang, a researcher with Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Development and Reform.

Amid the economic recovery, a Yiwu-based restaurant consumes 600 packs of wet tissues a day, as against 400 packs during the international financial crisis last year.

"The worker shortage, as well as the heavier workload for individual employees, have forced employers to offer better pays and compensation packages -- it's a good thing to this end," said Prof. Wu Jinliang with the Zhejiang Provincial Party School. "But it also eats way the competitive edge of thousands of small businesses that used to rely on cheap labor."

Besides the worker scarcity, many entrepreneurs are also worrying about the skills and overall quality of their employees.

Zhou Xiaoguang, president of a Yiwu-based decoration firm, remembers the dainty products he saw at an exposition in Europe. "Why can't we produce stuff like that? We can spend heavily to buy better equipment and hire better designers, but we don't have high-caliber workers at our production lines."

Langsha Group, China's leading producer of socks and stockings, dropped a procurement plan last year for an Italian-made automatic packing machine that could spare the manual work of 30 workers and improve quality.

"No one is able to run the machine or fix it if it breaks down," said the group's president Weng Rongdi. "Our lack of training for the workers is a big problem."

"Like all other Chinese manufacturing companies, we need high-caliber workers if we want to make further breakthroughs," he said.