China’s migrant workforce getting older as pay rises lag behind general population
- Over-50s now make up almost a third of China’s vast migrant workforce, while the number aged under 30 has dropped over the past five years
- Official figures show this group saw an average pay rise of 3.6 per cent last year, less than the 6.1 increase among the wider population
The report, published by the National Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday, found that the average monthly salary of migrant workers rose by 3.6 per cent to 4,780 yuan (US$660) in 2023 compared with the previous year.
However, this is less than the average national increase of 6.1 per cent recorded earlier this year, and is also lower than the 6 per cent average rise in the pre-pandemic years of 2018 and 2019.
The latest report also found that more women joined the ranks of migrant workers last year, making up 37.3 per cent of the total compared with 36.6 per cent the previous year. This is around four points higher than in 2014, the first time the statistics bureau started recording the gender split.
In the past few decades, urbanisation has drawn hundreds of millions of people from China’s countryside to the cities in the hope of making more money than in their rural birthplaces and lifting their families out of poverty.
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But over time the average age has been creeping upwards, from 40.8 in 2019 to 43.1 in 2023. Meanwhile, the number of over-50s increased from 24.6 per cent to 30.6 per cent over the same period, while the proportion aged between 16 and 30 dropped from 25.1 per cent to 17.6 per cent.
Manufacturing, retail and services remain among the main sources of employment for China’s migrant workers, whose numbers stood at 297.5 million last year – a slight increase on the previous year.
But the proportion employed in the construction sector dropped from 17.7 per cent in 2022 to 15.4 per cent last year.
“The decline is related to the shrinking of property investments in China,” commented Zhang Bo, chief analyst at 58 Anjuke Real Estate Research Institute, told Yicai, a Shanghai-based business platform.
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Meanwhile, the higher cost of living in China’s affluent coastal provinces has also driven more businesses to move production to the country’s inland provinces, attracting more migrant workers to find work in central and western regions.
According to the report, migrant workers are also more inclined to find non-farming work near their hometowns, as the number of those who moved to a different province for a job fell below 70 million for the first time in recent years.
