CHINA: Today and tomorrow are much like any other day in China. Mark Godfrey reports from Beijing, where almost half the population works seven days a week
"They're very hard-working aren't they? I hear Chinese people's pastime is working."
My Dutch friend's innocent email query was off the mark, but not completely. Few peoples seem to work as feverishly as the Chinese. A bus ride around Beijing early on Sunday morning paints a kaleidoscope of human endeavour. The building sites are alive, men and women pedal rubbish carts, horses and belching trucks haul bricks about and shopkeepers roll up shutters.
There's not much differentiation indeed between the days of the week in Beijing. With no religious influences among the vast majority of the populace, there's little moral opposition to working Sundays. According to the Beijing Statistics Bureau, 44 per cent of city residents work seven days a week.
City and state government chiefs have made some efforts to promote a five-day working week and labour laws promise at least one day off every week but there seems little serious prioritising of leisure time.
Chinese labour laws limit the work week to 40 hours and enshrine at least one 24-hour period off per week, according to Mr Mark Luo of Li & Li, a Beijing-based law firm.
A State Council circular issued in March 1995 encouraged a five-day working week nationwide. Eight years later however only 45 per cent of Beijing's workers enjoys both Saturday and Sunday off. Like the US and Japan, Chinese labour laws legislate for a minimum 10 days off every year. But the figure compares poorly to European equivalents. Danish and Swedish workers are entitled to 30 days of holidays according to law, while Ireland's workers can claim 20 days leave every year.
Most of those working seven days tend to be waiters, security guards and construction workers. Beijing is a city of thousands of restaurants and building sites and migrant workers usually make their start in the capital in either one. With so much competition for jobs, aggrieved workers are not keen to visit the local state-run labour office or to take exploitative employers to court.
Floods of migrants arriving in China's largest cities every day take up jobs on construction sites. These sites across the city are crammed with building equipment and workers' housing - migrant workers tend to live on site, usually with their families. Other, younger workers, gather about hazy television sets after their shift, tucking into noodles as they follow garish costume drama.
Something that immediately strikes a visitor is the profusion of workers in China. Little wonder that Beijing feels like such a safe city. Alongside police patrols and military guards keeping an eye along most central boulevards, security guards protect schools, apartment buildings, parks and almost every private enterprise with a door.
A rotating team of 10 guards keeps a 24-hour watch on the secondary school in my neighbourhood. Most of the guards there are 20 or younger, their accents naming half a dozen distant provinces. These young security guards are part of China's enormous workforce, keen to leave rural poverty to compete for a city wage and city comforts. Unable to complete secondary education, they came to the capital to earn the cash that might ease hardships for families living in depressed rural areas. With wages at 600 Yuan (€64) a month, on top of their room and board, there's not much cash to send home.
The supply of labour is predicted to race ahead of demand in coming years, as migrants surge into the cities. Not everyone will be lucky enough to get a job.
According to figures published by the official-issue People's Daily newspaper, for the 23 million seeking jobs in urban areas in the next three or four years, only about 8 million job opportunities will be available.
China's planned communist economy has changed utterly and unemployment is a hard reality faced across the country, as Beijing becomes ever less willing to prop up ailing state industries. The registered unemployment rate in cities and towns was 3.6 per cent in 2002 according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
Interestingly, most Chinese appear to support the principle of a market economy and support the concept even when it does them out of a job.
There's little bitterness in Wu Yi's voice. He lost his job at a state-owned electrical fittings plant when China began to open up to reform.
"Competition is right. It's necessary," he said. "This is reform and I support it. Every company can't just be developed in the same way, the way it was. They need competition to be good."