Feb 20, 2008
A customer buying vegetables at a market in Nanjing. Vegetables prices rose by 17.5 per cent last month in China. -- GRAPHICS: QUEK HONG SHIN, PHOTO: REUTERS
BEIJING - CHINA'S southern Guangdong province will raise its minimum wage to help workers cope with rising inflation and attract more migrants to its factories, the provincial government said yesterday.
The minimum wage in Guangzhou, the capital of the province that is China's manufacturing hub, will rise to 860 yuan (S$170) per month from 790 yuan from April 1, the Guangdong labour bureau said on its website (www.gd.lss.gov.cn).
'It will help relieve recent price pressure and ensure basic living standards for low-income labourers,' the bureau said.
'Raising the minimum wage will further increase the attraction of Guangdong for employees, lure external labourers and ensure they stay, thus resolving the difficulty of some local firms in recruiting sufficient workers.'
Up to 14,000 Hong Kong-owned factories in the Pearl River Delta may be forced to close over the next few months due to a shortage of workers, according to the Federation of Hong Kong Industries.
The federation's chairman, Mr Clement Chen, told Hong Kong newspaper The Standard on Sunday that there was a labour shortage because wages in Guangdong were no longer attractive.
The winter storms that had crippled the mainland's infrastructure had also prevented migrant workers from returning to work after their Chinese New Year holidays, he said.
REUTERS
4N1 & 4N2, didn't we just did an exercise about the spread effect from Hong Kong to Guangdong. Now, things have changed.... Guangdong's pay has not been attractive, therefore the workers have moved on to other cities. This may lead to the closing down of some HK factories because of shortage of workers. Strange.. things keep changing so we've to keep reading to update ourselves.
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