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Enlarge the employment, improve the social security system, and Make the best use of talent resources |
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12:45, September 15, 2009 |
Enlarge employment to give people "rice bowl".
"Employment concerns the livelihood of every family, and it is a huge project which affects millions of families." Yin Weimin got emotional when talking about the employment issue in China. He said, China has the world's largest population and labor force, and it is facing a huge challenge providing food for more than one billion people and creating job opportunities for hundreds of millions of laborers at a time when we are in the primary stage of socialism. Yin said, "What is encouraging is that employment in both urban and rural areas has been expanding since the founding of China 60 years ago, and hundreds of millions of people can now live a better life and achieve greater development."
Yin said China has experienced three serious challenges of unemployment in the past 60 years and the government dealt with all these problems with a sober mind. "In the beginning, we had to seek jobs for 4 million unemployed people that had come from the old society before 1949." During that time, the country decisively implemented an employment system featuring unified job assignment, which helped to push forward employment work effectively, and also made constructive contribution to carrying out the planned large-scale socialist construction at that time.
The second challenge took place after the culture revolution. At that time, more than 10 million re-educated urban young people returned to cities from the countryside and mountainous areas. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the State Council proposed a policy to create jobs in three ways--job placements by labor departments, voluntary employment organized by themselves, and self-employment. In 1979-1983, we totally settled 39.16 million people to work in cities and towns, which not only alleviated the employment burden of the re-educated urban young people that had swarmed into cities, but also broke the traditional employment reliance on state-owned enterprises. Since then, significant changes have taken place in employment forms and structure"
The third challenge occurred after the mid 1990s, when the problem of laid –off workers from state-owned companies became urgent to resolve. The "Two Guarantees" system — to guarantee the basic livelihood of the laid-off from state-owned enterprises, and to guarantee the dispatch of basic pensions for the retired in full and on time, played a very important role. From 1998 to 2001, about 25.5 million people were laid off by state-owned enterprises, but most of them were registered with re-employment service centers, to receive basic allowances, which meant a successful soft-landing for abundant corporate employees.
While we fought with such challenges from time to time, the employment scale at both rural and urban areas has expanded steadily. The number of employed people increased from 207 million in 1952 to 775 million in 2008, showing a 3.74 fold rise. In 1978-2008, the average number of newly employed people per year reached more than 12 million. The registered unemployment rate has been at a low level for a long period of time and we have successfully kept the employment situation stable at a time when there is striking unbalance between labor supply and demand, and the global and domestic economies are in volatile and complicated situation.
Yin said, we are facing a more complicated and arduous task on employment in view of the financial crisis, as there are more excessive laborers on the market, mainly college graduates, migrant workers and difficult people in cities and towns. But he was full of confidence that steadying the employment situation would be possible. "The CPC Central Committee and State Council regarded the employment problem as an important issue pertinent to people's livelihood, and included it to be an integral part of comprehensive packages of measures to deal with the financial crisis. As the implementation of these measures moves deeper, we believe, we can achieve fuller employment and ensure the stability of labor market.
Improving social security, knitting a security net for the general public
A new rural old-age insurance system will be launched in pilot areas soon. Not long ago, Minister Yin carried a field study in Baoji county, Shanxi province, and was deeply impressed by a farmer who just received his pension. "I asked him how he would spend the pension, he answered that with this money, he can now buy Saozi noodles, but he could only have Lazi noodles in the past; besides that, he wants to use the money to buy books for his grandson. If his grandson feels happy, the whole family will be happy. So you can understand that social security means more than several hundreds of yuan for our people.
Minister Yin said the social security system was an important symbol of social advancement and civilization. China's social security system started from the founding of the country, and was developed from nothing, and expanded from cities and towns to rural areas, from professionals to the ordinary people, step by step with efforts to perfect it unwavering.
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