Migrants are losing hope in a better life

Yesterday the young man delivering mineral water for our office said he was going to quit his job. He would be the second to do so this month.

"I can tolerate the pay, although it is merely enough to support my life, but I gain nothing from this work," he said. "I cannot imagine what the future will be like."

It seems that many of the 252 million migrant workers in the country echo his sentiments.

The "2012 Survey of Migrant Workers' Life Feelings" jointly released by Renmin University of China and gongzhong.cn, a website for blue-collar workers, found that most migrant workers derive their happiness not from relationships or personal development but from simply surviving.

However, they frequently ask themselves: "Is this what I'll be doing for the whole of my life?"

"The gloomy outlook makes many migrant workers feel depressed," said Li Jiuxin, the director of the research center at gongzhong.cn, who organized the survey.

Li said that most migrant workers do simple physical labor such as deliveries, construction, and restaurant work, which offer few if any opportunities for promotion and pursuit of a better life.

"In today's society, jobs should mean more than just a wage to cover living costs," Li said. "They should also be a way to develop skills and accumulate social resources. Only these combined with expectations of a rising salary offer hope for a better future."

But most migrant workers have little chance of learning new skills, as their jobs are repetitive physical labor. Even those working in factories that have the possibility of becoming skilled workers are no better off.

"Migrant workers rarely occupy any core positions in factories," Li said, "So the skills they gain by sitting beside the line for over 12 hours a day do little to increase their bargaining power and raise their wages."

In fact, sometimes such jobs can make things worse. Li talked to one group of workers who were doing lower-paid jobs because their eyesight had been ruined by the welding they had been doing for eight years.

And such jobs offer few social networks. Li found that migrant workers tend to group together with relatives, friends from their villages or workers from the same areas. Many migrant workers get their jobs through word of mouth from people they know.

"Their social networks are formed in their home villages and their jobs in the cities do little to promote new relationships."

Besides, their long working hours, most work more than 12 hours a day, deprive migrant workers of the chance to embrace life in the cities where they labor, he added.

"Migrant workers are what Henry Ford called the 'cheap pair of hands,'" Li said, "Being one of the most powerless parts of the modern industrial machine, they have few resources to trade for a better tomorrow."

Society needs to create a better environment for migrant workers to climb up the social ladder, said Sun Jianmin, a psychology professor at Renmin University of China, who was also involved with the survey.

"If workers lose the hope that they are working for a better tomorrow, they might choose other ways to improve their lives, which might be dangerous," he said.

This should arouse our concern, as the survey found the sense of desperation was most evident among younger migrant workers, Sun added, pointing out that this is contrary to the norm, as young people should still have bigger hopes for the future.

Li and his team have now devoted themselves to setting up an Internet platform for migrant workers to communicate with each other.

"We are helping expand their social networks, so that they can not only unite, but also get more chances of education," Li said. "We hope that will make their futures brighter."

zhangzhouxiang@chinadaily.com.cn