CHINA: The world's most populous country has reported a shortage of workers but exploitation hasn't ended.
At 9am it's already balmy in the industrial zone near Shenzhen and groups of young migrant workers fan themselves with their application forms as they line up outside the Foxconn factory complex.
Over 100,000 people work on the firm's campus, on the outskirts of the southern Chinese boomtown and the Taiwanese electronics component maker is looking for more hands to help feed the rising demands of the high-tech sector.
While it seems inconceivable that the world's most populous country - with a population of 1.3 billion - should have a shortage of workers, the labour ministry confirmed in a report that factories in the Pearl river delta in the south and the eastern Yangtze river delta are short of about two million workers.
This means jobseekers in Shenzhen can choose to either work at Foxconn, or Chinese telecoms giant Huawei nearby, or one of the thousands of firms that have turned China into the world's factory, producing half of all finished goods.
Liu Qihong, from Jiangxi province, has been in Shenzhen for three months. He has high expectations for what he can earn and is utterly confident he will get a job.
"There are more opportunities here. I'm waiting for the right job and I'll give it another three months. If I don't get the money I want, I'll go somewhere else to get more," he said.
The shortage is caused by massive demand for workers to make the toys, shoes, electronic goods and garments driving China's economic boom.
"Low pay has made some migrants quit their jobs and choose better ones," said Mo Rong, deputy head of the labour ministry's research institute.
China's central bank described the shortage of migrant workers in the south of the country as a "structural problem deserving of close attention".
Shenzhen is a city built on migrant workers. A town of 30,000 back in 1980, it now has a population of eight million, most of them workers from the provinces of Jiangxi, Hubei or Sichuan.
One natural offshoot of the luxury of picking and choosing what job to take is that workers are less likely to be happy with their lot.
Trade unions are banned in China and organising strikes can lead to imprisonment. But there have been individual incidents of industrial disputes at factories where workers call for more money or better conditions.
The central government wants to make sure the new urban working class enjoys its share of China's new prosperity. It is also intent on making sure strikes and go slows at southern factories do not turn into broader social unrest.
It's lunchtime and hundreds of workers are milling around the airy Hongti Community Canteen in the Bagualing Industrial Centre.
The workers pick up their food at the windows and eat them at long canteen tables. Like everywhere else in Shenzhen, no one appears to be over 30 years of age and most are women; 60 per cent of migrant workers are female.
The atmosphere is lively and the conversation in the canteen based around the common Chinese greeting: "Have you eaten?" Qu Yan enjoys her work in a liquid crystal display (LCD) company because it's clean. Eating rice, vegetables and pork from a white polystyrene lunchbox, she said she earns around 1,500 yuan (€150) a month for piecework.
"I like living in Shenzhen because it's warmer than my home town of Jilin. My husband and I have an apartment here," she said, sipping from a Pepsi can emblazoned with a picture of footballer Thierry Henry.
Ms Qu's wage is at the upper end for factory work. By some estimates, labour costs have risen by anything up to 25 per cent since last year.
At the same table, Li Xia (32), from Meizhou in Guangdong province, works for what was formerly a state-owned company but is now private.
"The salary and working conditions have improved in the 10 years I've been here," she said, packing up the remainder of her lunch. No point in wasting a five-yuan lunch.
In room 305 of a large, crumbling dormitory building, night-shift workers from a textile company are catching some shut-eye before that night's shift. Each room has four steel bunks and occupants sleep on wooden bed boards and keep their belongings in a pile at the end of the bed.
Laundry hangs at one end of the room, where there is a small communal washroom, with eight toothbrushes arranged in cups. The room is dingy but orderly and fairly clean.
"I like living here; it's better than home. I used to do the same job at home in a clothing company ... Now I earn 1,250 yuan (€125) every month, but I only earned 800 yuan (€80) in my home town," said Xie Weihong (22), who, like his seven room-mates, comes from Hubei province.
The dormitory manager, in shorts and a T-shirt and drawing on a cigarette, barges in, asking noisily what the young men think they're doing, talking to foreigners. But we are allowed to continue the interview.
"I go home at Chinese New Year and also went home last July. I'm very happy with the conditions here and the factory pays the rent," said Mr Xie.
The sheer pace of economic growth means some labour shortfall is likely, but there are other factors, including new government policies to help farmers and narrow the urban-rural divide, said Bai Hai, who manages a printing plant, over a lunch of excellent handmade local noodles.
"There is a labour shortage because of changes in the legislation to encourage farming communities. They have changed the tax situation and they pay you to work the fields," said Mr Bai.
The picture in Shenzhen is a lot rosier than the days when the traditional image of the migrant worker was of an illiterate middle-aged farmer arriving in the Big Smoke with all his worldly goods in a plastic bag.
There is a general sense of well-being and confidence among the workers, and the factories I visited in Shenzhen were clean and orderly. Most workers seemed happy with wages and conditions. Any who were not said they would vote with their feet and leave.
However, labour activists warn that China has a long way to go before the working environment matches that of the developed world.
"The labour shortage is becoming more and more serious but it's not leading to a big increase in salary for most workers," said Dr Liu Kaiming, executive director of the Institute of Contemporary Observation, a non-government organisation focused on migrant workers.
"Most factories in Guangdong are not paying minimum wage, including a few big European companies," he said.
"Each week in Shenzhen there is a strike, usually about salaries being too low or working time too long, and the government is trying to deal with this. Migrant workers can make a living here but they know little about their rights," said Dr Liu.
There is still exploitation of workers in factories, particularly of children. The sweatshops using child labour still exist in southern China, although they are moving further inland to escape the attentions of increasingly vigilant state agencies.
"There are many children working in these factories; some just 14 or 15 years old. One girl working in a shoe factory last week told me she works 10 hours a day, seven days a week, for less than 1,000 yuan (€100) a month. She said she felt like a failure. So you see we still have a lot of work to do," said the energetic campaigner.
The government acknowledges that millions of migrant workers are underpaid or working in poor conditions and has made efforts to improve their lot by eliminating restrictions on companies employing migrant workers, opening up public job agencies and providing information and training.
The internet means Chinese workers know more than ever before about wages, conditions and benefits, and foreign firms are focusing more on corporate responsibility after a number of high-profile public relations disasters over the use of cheap labour in the developing world. In the community centre, Dr Liu runs training courses for migrant workers.
"These days, being without English or computer skills is like beingilliterate. We try to give a basic standard in both," said teacher Wang Linli.
In Mr Wang's classroom, Hunan native Peng Cuihua, wearing a pink Clash T-shirt, is doing a typing test.
"I could get a job at home but this city has energy - it's competitive," she said.
Yao Ji left her home town in Anhui and worked in several electronics firms. She is training so she can get a better job than the one she has just left, where there were strikes at the factory over low pay and working conditions were terrible.
"I was working too hard, 10 hours a day, six days a week, and I was always tired. I don't want to stay in Shenzhen for ever. I just want a decent job," she said.
