Migrant workers get chance for urban residency
Guangdong has launched a scheme that will allow 10 million migrant workers from rural parts of the province to apply for permanent residency in small and medium-sized cities and townships.
The scheme, which will assess migrant workers on the basis of points allocated for various achievements, will not cover the 20 million workers from other provinces who labour in Guangdong.
Applicants from rural Guangdong will be assessed on their education level, work experience, social-security status, community activities and adherence to birth-control policy, The Southern Metropolis News reported yesterday. They will also need clean criminal records.
Workers who score at least 60 points out of a maximum 370 are eligible to apply.
Guangdong authorities say they plan to give 1.8 million Guangdong farmers urban hukou (residential permits) by 2012.
Academics criticised the new system for setting the bar too high for most migrant workers.
The new urban hukou scheme, similar to immigration-points schemes in foreign countries, will mark down migrant workers who do not have university degrees or technical certificates, and those who have more children than allowed by the government's birth-control policy.
Migrant workers with a junior-secondary education will get five points under the system, while university graduates will get 80.
Assembly workers will be given 10 points and senior technicians will receive 60.
Those who have more children than allowed will lose at least 100 points and won't be allowed to apply for urban hukou for five years.
Professor Guo Weiqing, a public policy and administration specialist from Sun Yat-Sen University, said very few migrant workers would be able to fulfil the strict criteria.
'Our surveys suggest that most migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta region received education up to junior-secondary school and many don't have their graduate certificates,' he said.
To qualify for an urban hukou, a poorly educated Guangdong farmer who has only worked on assembly lines will need to donate blood five times, work as a volunteer for 250 hours and make sure his employer has paid for his pension, medical insurance and industrial-accident insurance for at least eight years.
Rather than divide migrant workers according to their education, skills or status, Guo suggested that the authorities should consider giving urban hukou to migrant workers according to their taxation records, saying it was a less biased assessment method.
Guangdong authorities said the scheme could help young migrant workers, born after the 1980s, settle down in small cities and townships, giving them a sense of belonging.
The deputy director of the province's labour and social security department, Lin Wangping , told a press conference on Monday that young migrant workers were more eager to be recognised as city dwellers than their parents.
Many mainland observers have long called for the scrapping of the hukou system - which prevents migrant workers from settling in cities. They said doing so would remove the pay differences that confront migrant workers, along with other forms of policy and social discrimination, and would do away with the need for around-the-clock control of workers' lives.
Shanghai announced a similar policy last year that would grant hukou to immigrants who had been registered in the city for at least seven years, as long as they had had a stable income, a 'good credit rating' and had paid their social-security contributions and taxes in Shanghai throughout the period. State media quoted migrant workers living in Shanghai as saying that the criteria were too difficult to meet.
Professor Wang Daben from East China Normal University said cities could not afford to grant urban hukou to all migrant workers because of the huge cost of extending social welfare, including education, housing and medical services.
