CSER Sustainability Report (English) - high res-rev - Flextronics

16
6 Our People
Foreword by Alexandra Harney
China’s migrant workforce’s
mindset has changed more in
the last five years than at any
time in the past 30 years. The
tens of thousands of young
workers who sit on trains, boats
and buses for up to 24 hours to
reach Flextronics’ factories today,
are less motivated by money,
faster to complain, and harder to
understand than ever before.
Demographics have given
Chinese workers more leverage.
China’s family planning policy,
introduced in 1979, has lowered
the country’s birth rate to 1.5
children per woman, just above
that of Japan. As a result, in the
last several years, the lines of
applicants that once ran around
the block at many factories have
shortened, and in many cases
even disappeared. There are
simply not as many people around
to work in factories: the number of
Chinese between the ages of 15
to 19 peaked in 2005.
Just as important as the actual
number of workers is their
mindset. Growing up in smaller
families in an ever-wealthier
China, today’s migrants have a
greater sense of their own value.
Their parents have higher hopes
for them.
And workers have more options.
A job assembling printers in a
coastal factory is no longer the
only choice for a young man or
woman with a junior high school
or high school diploma. There
are also opportunities to work
in stores, restaurants, hotels,
hospitals and beauty salons.
Factory work, regardless of
whether the factory is owned by
a Nasdaq-listed multinational
or a local businessman, has
quickly acquired a social stigma,
particularly among people born
after 1990. I regularly meet
workers who tell me they never
want to work in a factory. But
many admit the other options are
also not ideal.
Companies with a manufacturing
presence in China ride on the
knife’s edge of these rapid
and confusing changes. With
double-digit wage rises and
strikes increasingly common,
understanding the workforce is
no longer the job of a handful of
labor activists and corporate social
responsibility (CSR) executives.
It is essential knowledge for any
company serious about remaining
globally competitive.
The implications for companies
employing people in China
are manifold. First, companies
need to adjust to the idea that
in many ways, Chinese workers
have become more like their
counterparts in other countries.
They know their legal rights. They
stand up for themselves. And their
expectations are only rising. That
means that wage inflation is here
to stay. But so are sit-ins, strikes
and other protest actions.
Second, Chinese migrant talent
are much more mobile than their
counterparts in other countries.
Many think nothing of changing
employers more than once a
year, particularly if the salary
drops because of a slowdown in
the business. That means that
high turnover is a fact of life in
China. Workers are slippery and
their slipperiness is costly for
employers who have to train their
replacements.
Third, Chinese workers are hungry
for advancement and status.
Employers that tap into these
desires through, for example,
programs that enable workers
to see a path to promotion or
entrepreneurial pursuits will
retain their staff for longer while
achieving higher productivity.
For companies like Flextronics
that employ migrants in China, the
conversation must be even bigger
than CSR and sustainability. Legal
and competitive working hours,
wages and conditions are the
minimum standard. The discussion
now must be about finding ways to
understand, inspire and retain this
changing Chinese workforce.
Flextronics CSER Report 2010 / 2011