Think we're the only country with an aging workforce? Guess again. China's starting to suffer a shortage of young, cheap workers.
An excerpt from the NYT story:
SHANGHAI, March 19 — When she reached 50, the retirement age for many women here, Chen Rui, a career accountant, immediately did what millions of people of her generation have begun doing: she scrambled to find a new job.
While second careers are common in the West and are often embraced as a chance to satisfy long-held ambitions, for huge numbers of Chinese city dwellers like Mrs. Chen, a widow, eking out another decade or two of paid work is more a matter of survival.
In this sense, Mrs. Chen is anything but alone.
The proportion of people 60 and older is growing faster in China than in any other major country, with the number of retirees set to double between 2005 and 2015, when it is expected to reach 200 million. By midcentury, according to United Nations projections, roughly 430 million people — about a third of the population — will be retirees.
That increase will place enormous demands on the country’s finances and could threaten the underpinnings of the Chinese economy, which has thrived for decades on the cheap labor of hundreds of millions of young, uneducated workers from the countryside. Changes in the country’s population structure are taking place hand in hand with changes in the structure of the Chinese family. China’s one-child policy, which began in 1980, means that, beginning with the current generation of young adults, couples will face the difficult task of caring for four parents through old age.
By the same token, the ratio of workers to retired people will decline from about six to one now to about two to one by 2040.
Under the current two-tiered system, the retirement age for blue-collar urban workers is 50 for women and 55 for men, while for higher-grade professionals and government workers it is 55 for women and 60 for men. Obviously, raising the retirement ages would ease a substantial amount of pressure on the pension system. But there are no plans to do so, and raising the retirement ages would present another set of problems for the government, experts here say.
Last year, for example, 4.13 million young Chinese graduated from universities, and fully 30 percent of them are still unemployed. Unemployment is high among those who are not university graduates, as well. Prolonging employment for older workers would make this predicament worse, possibly with volatile consequences.
Breaking a lifelong promise and abruptly extending the retirement age would create another large class of malcontents. As a result, the government has been unable to reach a consensus on how to handle the problem, which is leaving people like Mrs. Chen in an increasingly difficult position.