GUANGZHOU: Labor authorities in the southern province of Guangdong have drawn up a series of measures to protect the interests of workers amid a round of factory closures and a drop in job openings in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region this year.

"We have been keeping a close eye on this situation in the region. And one of the urgent things needed is to draw up measures to protect the interests of workers who have lost jobs due to the closures," said Zhang Xiang, a publicity official for the Guangdong Provincial Labor and Security Department.

According to a notice issued recently, the labor authority will help workers get their wages via legal means after the closure of factories.

"If factories can't pay back wages, we will work closely with local governments to collect money for workers," Zhang said.

In a recent case, the Zhuangmutou township government of Dongguan helped pay owed wages on behalf of Smart Union, a Hong Kong-listed toy maker, which closed two of its factories last month, affecting nearly 7,000 workers.

Smart Union owed its workers at least six-weeks worth of wages totaling 24 million yuan.

The PRD region, one of the major manufacturing bases in the southern mainland, has seen a rising number of labor-intensive factories forced to close this year due to rising labor and production costs and lower demand in overseas markets.

Besides helping settle the disputes of owed wages after closures, the provincial labor authority will also open a special channel for unemployment insurances, meaning special services will be opened at social insurance organizations to help workers obtain unemployment compensation immediately.

"Additionally, we will organize a series of trainings for those unemployed workers to help them better find new jobs," Zhang said.

The authority will also organize more job fairs that are specially designed for unemployed workers.

Meanwhile, the authority said that there were more people looking for new jobs in the third quarter.

According to a report issued yesterday by the provincial labor authority, there were more than one million people in the third quarter, or 112,700 more than during the same period last year, seeking jobs in labor markets.

"There was a rising number of workers who lost jobs due to the closure of factories, especially in the export-oriented enterprises," Zhang said.

Compared with the climbing number of the unemployed, the number of job vacancies is dropping. According to the report, job vacancies in the third quarter were about two million and had dropped 2.96 percent from the second quarter.

The manufacturing sector saw an even steeper drop in vacancies, by 4.68 percent, to 980,500 in the third quarter.

(HK Edition 11/07/2008 page1)