Chinese Workers Take away U.S. Jobs? Maybe the Reverse

Well-known Chinese site Sina recently published an article aggregating reports from a number of media sources on China’s job market. The author started with an acknowledgment of Donald Trump’s point of view on China which used to have cheap labor and which therefore attracted a lot of labor work from the United States. However, things have been changing dramatically in today’s Chinese job market. China is moving towards making more and more value-added products and the average labor rate in China is now 29 percent higher than what it was three years ago. The Boston Consulting research firm found, when both productivity and energy costs are counted, the cost of manufacturing in China’s major export regions is almost the same as that in the U.S. The same research pointed out that 24 percent of the U.S. companies in China surveyed are actively moving back to the States or plan to do so in the next two years. Other companies that make products for major U.S. labels like Michel Kors, Rockport, Dockers, and Brooks Brothers are moving to cheaper countries like Vietnam. With the slowdown of the Chinese economy, more and more Chinese workers are losing their jobs. The British consulting company Fathom released a report estimating China’s unemployment rate to be 12.9 percent, not the official four percent. It seems the U.S. competitiveness is taking away China’s jobs.