Why Is It Difficult For Chinese Enterprises To Get Wages So Low?

Recently, the topic of surviving hardship and discussing the issue of low wages is constantly debating on the Internet. Even though many of my friends are at parties, they often complain about why our wages are so low. At the same time, many of my entrepreneurs' friends often complain with the author that enterprises are really operating at a difficult time, and the cost of labor is rising too fast, which greatly compresses the profits of enterprises. Now many enterprises are overwhelmed by the high cost of labor. When these two views are heard more, I am puzzled. This is a paradox. On the one hand, almost everyone is talking about low wages. On the other hand, why do most enterprises complain about the high cost of labor? In view of this problem, the author begins to analyze the environment we live in.

All along, Chinese enterprises, both private enterprises and state-owned enterprises, have enjoyed a very great advantage in reform and opening up. This advantage is called demographic dividend in economics. Because of the beginning of reform and opening up, family planning has not yet been fully implemented, and there is a large number of labor force on land. With the progress of reform and opening up, these labor force has been released from the land gradually. These labor-intensive and cheap labor force has become the first power to support the development of Chinese enterprises. Therefore, Chinese enterprises began to gradually form a habit from that era. This habit is to hire low cost employees, because at that time China's price level was not high, plus the large number of working people and enterprises, even low wages, enterprises could easily employ a large number of people, so that Chinese enterprises formed their own competitive advantage: low price.

This is based on Manpower cost The extremely low and low price has enabled a large number of Chinese enterprises to gain the competitive edge of the market and win the competition in the world economy. China has become the world factory. It can be said that low labor cost has become the development engine of Chinese enterprises. However, this advantage is being gradually lost. Since 2004, the labor shortage has begun to appear in the PRD. The shortage of labor has spread from the Pearl River Delta to the Yangtze River Delta after the financial crisis in 2008. In fact, it is not that there are no workers in China, but with the improvement of people's living standard and the rise of the price level, the original wages have hardly been invited to the workers again.

Many enterprises are forced to raise their wage standards. In order to ensure production, but because of low cost in the past few years, the whole world thinks that China should lower the price, and the Chinese enterprises lack the core competitiveness, the pricing power of the products is completely out of our hands. This causes the wages of employees to rise and the prices of products remain unchanged, and ultimately the enterprises are getting more and more difficult to survive. This explains why entrepreneurs always say that Chinese employees are increasingly unable to afford it, because the wage cost is really high compared with the previous low wages. This problem is actually not a paradox, because the object of comparison is different. The object of comparison is the low wages of the first 30 years, or even the wage standard compared with those in Southeast Asia and Africa. But as an ordinary Chinese employee, he needs to survive in China, so he himself weighs himself. Wage standard It's the cost of living now. What we see is that the cost of living is much higher than in previous years.

I remember when I was a child, five cents can buy a lot of things, basically all the necessary stationery can be bought, but now do not say five corners of money, five yuan I am afraid it is difficult to buy a student's learning supplies. Of course, this is just a small interlude. Specifically, compared with thirty years ago, the price level of the whole has gone up sharply. According to the calculation by Professor Zhong Wei of Beijing Normal University, let's take a look at the specific comparison. The price of rice has increased from 37 yuan to 0.12 yuan per Jin from the beginning of reform and opening up to 4.4 yuan per Jin, up 37 times. Chinese cabbage has increased 90 times from 0.02 yuan per Jin to 1.8 yuan per Jin in 80s. Therefore, Professor Zhong Wei believes that at present, at the beginning of the reform and opening up, 10000 yuan households now have at least 2 million 550 thousand yuan to match the same year.

Because housing belongs to economics. Investment According to the data of Beijing, the cost of rent per month in Beijing is about 1.5 yuan a month, but the average rent in Beijing has reached 2500 yuan, and the gap between them is as high as 2083 times. Let's look at the price of housing again. Since the reform and opening up in the early part of China adopted welfare allocation and housing prices could not be converted into monetization, we used the price of housing in 90s to calculate the average price of houses in Huangpu District, Shanghai, which was 1500 yuan per square meter in 96 years. In the past 20 years, the housing price in Huangpu District had been 71789 yuan per square meter, and in recent 20 years, housing prices had been 47.85 times 20 years ago.

At the beginning of reform and opening up, the cost of training a university student from primary school to university has not exceeded 140 yuan, and now the cost of training from primary school to university is nearly 150 thousand yuan at the lowest cost, which is as high as 1071 times. Besides seeing a doctor, the cost of seeing a doctor at the beginning of the reform and opening up is 0.98 yuan, and the average cost is at least 90 yuan. The cost should be 90 times. Now let's see how much income has increased. In the early days of reform and opening up, there was a data on my side. The national average wage in 1986 was 1271 yuan, the average annual salary in 1996 was 5500 yuan, the average annual salary in the end of 2015 was 72840 yuan, the 30 year time wage rose 57 times, and the increase in the last 20 years was 13.24 times.

Perhaps such an incomplete comparison will be able to see that in addition to the state controlled price increases such as rice and wage can be tied to wages, almost all the major expenditures are more than wage increases, which is why we complain about the real cause of low wages: because our wage growth is totally behind the increase in prices, housing prices and education and health expenses, that's all. Enterprises are also difficult, employees are also difficult, then we really understand why, for enterprises, I believe many people have mentioned solutions, that is spanformation and upgrading, improve the technology content, here I will not do too much to repeat. What should we do for each of us? A trend we are seeing now is that it is almost impossible for us to catch up with the increase in the prices of other necessities only on the basis of the increase in wages. This requires us to really do something to counteract the rise in prices.