According to a China Confidential survey in seven provinces, shortages of manufacturing labour are now present almost everywhere, even in rural counties that were once famous for supplying coastal factory towns with migrant workers.
Grassroots research shows that demographic changes, coupled with growing employment opportunities in rural areas and the mass of working-age people who have already migrated, are the main reasons for the spreading labour shortage.
For example, Zhugao, a township in Sichuan Province known for sending rural labor to coastal factories, now sends only around 15,000 workers a year to work in factory towns, down from around 45,000 a decade ago, according to local officials. Of these, only two thirds are aged 16-40, down from almost 100 per cent 10 years ago. Such examples are set to proliferate as China’s demographic dividend dwindles, a process that will intensify with the approach of 2015, when the population between 19 and 65 peaks out.
The shortage that such trends create is hitting employers from coastal Shanghai to several interior provinces. An average monthly workers’ salary in Wenzhou, the coastal business hub, jumped 17 per cent to Rmb1,810 in February from a year earlier, according to the City Career Service Centre. This, however, was not enough to lure enough workers back from the Spring Festival. In the first three weeks of February, the career centre received only 1,951 applications after posting 19,532 jobs.
http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2011/03/25/chinese-wage-inflation-more-to-come/#axzz1QXIMXjUI