Our migrant workers need some respect
By Steve Hubrecht (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-10-19 09:29
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You can see groups of migrant workers on the subway, clutching hard-hats and bundles of their possessions. Their faces are tanned and worn, deep wrinkles lining their foreheads, thick calluses on their hands. You also see them in the bank every so often, standing together in faded, scuffed clothes, laughing and joking with one another, probably happy to be sending money to their families back in their home villages.
And, of course, you see them every day on construction sites around the city, clambering up scaffolding with determination and dexterity, fitting, fixing, welding, hammering, breaking and building the city up. On rare occasions, you catch a glimpse of a group of them off-shift, resting in makeshift tents or shoddy dormitories, often nearby or right in the construction site on which they work, crammed tightly into cots or hard bunks.
Many work 12 hours a day, six days a week. Others work longer hours, seven days a week until the project that employs them is done. Pay is low. A skilled welder can make almost 2,000 yuan a month, but most migrant workers make around 1,000 yuan or so.
Migrant workers are unable to obtain Beijing hukou (permanent residence cards), which cuts them off from public healthcare, affordable housing and other social benefits, and keeps their children out of public schools in the capital. Though many cities, Beijing included, have worked out policies to ensure equal education chances for migrant workers, some still have to send their children to privately-run alternatives, which is often of lower quality.
Many migrant workers come from far-off provinces such as Hunan, Henan, Sichuan and Jiangxi, and get to return to their families only once a year. Some even go two or three years between visits home.
There are an estimated 4 million migrant workers in Beijing. Although the wages seem paltry compared with those of urbanite Beijingers, they are a boon to migrants. Many migrant workers save almost all of it to send back home. A rural Chinese family with at least one member working in the capital or another big city is almost certainly bumped up above the poverty line.
The migrants' dream, of not only surviving but of somehow carving out a better life, of maybe saving enough to get a daughter or son to and through college, has been the primary fuel of China's booming growth for the past decade.
It is no coincidence that one of the biggest ever surges in economic growth is occurring at the same time as the largest ever human migration (the estimated 150 million migrant workers who have left China's rural areas for its big eastern cities) and this is part of the reason. Time magazine listed the "Chinese worker" as a runner up for person of the year in 2009.
But, despite migrant workers' heroic and hard work, many affluent Beijing residents treat them with thinly veiled disdain. On the subway, some paler-skinned chicly dressed young Beijingers will slide down the bench or stand up rather than sitting next to tanned migrants in torn, stained cloths. In the banks, some upper and middle-class Beijingers shuffle away, giving migrant workers a wide berth and muttering about trying to keep their clothes clean.
Such attitudes are reprehensible. Beijing's success, the array of opportunities now afforded its residents and much of its sparkling new infrastructure owe a debt to the city's migrant workers. It's time all Beijingers gave them the respect they deserve.
