Take Advantage Of "China's Rampant Employment Discrimination"
Employers will always discriminate on the basis of something. As human beings, we just cannot help it. Obesity, ethnicity, height, looks, disability, race, gender, religion, age, sexuality, the list is endless. Smart employers try to avoid this. Basic economics dictates this.
The employer willing to pull its employees from a larger pool of potential employees than its competitors should end up with better work force for less money. It is like arbitrage in that the non-discriminating employer takes advantage of an inefficient market to hire employees others do not want for reasons unrelated to job performance.
China's employee market is woefully inefficient and small foreign companies are very well positioned to take advantage of this. How?
A recent Xinhua article in entitled, "Survey: Employment discrimination persists in China" highlights the extent of job discrimination present in today's China. The article is based on a survey of 3,454 people in 10 cities including Beijing, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Wuhan, Shenyang, Xi'an, Zhengzhou, Yinchuan and Qingdao conducted by the China University of Political Science and Law this year.
The results are as follows:
- 86 percent said discrimination exists in China's employment market
- 51 percent see the discrimination as serious.
- 22 had been denied job opportunities for physical disabilities
- 19 percent had been denied jobs "because of their low level of academic attainment" [is this really discrimination?]
- 19 percent had been denied jobs because their registered residence origin was not the same as the city where they were hunting for a job.
"The survey showed that discrimination is common in government departments, with gender, registered residence origin, height and appearance being the four criteria most frequently cited." The "63 percent said they would not employ HIV carriers, 56 percent said they would not recruit hepatitis B carriers, and 53 percent said they would not hire patients with venereal disease."
The article then details the job-hunting experience of "Guo Hui, who will graduate with a doctor's degree from China's top-notch Beijing University:"
Guo, a native of Handan in north China's Hebei Province, became paraplegic when she was 12 years old after a misdiagnosis.
She has sent out more than 100 job applications to employers in Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai since November but did not receive a single reply, Wednesday's People's Daily reported.
After quitting primary school because of discrimination, Guo --who is bound to a wheelchair -- studied by herself.
After getting her Master's degree from Shandong University, Guo applied for a job as a teacher, but was rejected because she was disabled.
She passed exams to enter the doctoral program at Beijing University in 2003.
Fluent in English and French and the recipient of several state-level scholarships, she could not even get a job as a part-time teacher when she was studying in Beijing.
"(I didn't get the jobs) -- not because I was unqualified, but because I was physically disabled," Guo said.
I cannot the only employer who when reading about someone with the brains and sheer determination of a Guo Hui thinks about hiring her. I must have heard at least ten times from small business clients doing business in China that they prefer hiring women in China because they can get much better employees that way and because the women they hire (unlike the men) do not come on board with an overriding and wholly unjustified" sense of entitlement." The male/female hiring gap in China is huge.
Regional discrimination is also huge in China and it too presents great hiring opportunities. We have a client with a factory in Shandong province who hires gets most workers from Sichuan because so many other companies reject them simply because they are from Sichuan.
Another discrimination in China is against "villagers" without a degree from one of China's top two or three universities. Another opportunity.
Take advantage.
Comments (10)
Read through and enter the discussion by using the form at the endnanheyangrouchuan - June 23, 2007 11:32 AM
Discrimination will probably never go away because we discriminate when choosing friends, life partners, one-nighters, food, clothes, etc.
And obesity in today's society, even in the US, is the final frontier. That girl in the wheelchair could probably do well in the West, but if she was obese (I don't a bit chunky, either) she would not do so well. Fat people are just as looked down upon in the rest of the world.
To satisfy Dan, I'll now begin my china bashing. It is official CCP policy to not hire people under a certain height and possessing "fair skin" because the CCP has their little "master race" image of what an ideal Han chinese should look like, and of course you have to be Han to get anywhere because tall, light skinned Han are what made china great in the past and are making china great again.
This thinking extends to dirty old bosses in the private sector and long time dirty old foreigners in the private sector who not only want people who fit a certain "ideal", they want people they can sexually harrass (BTW Dan, sexual harrassment is pretty much non-existent in China unless the harrassee comes from a connected family).
On the positive side, younger chinese entreprenuers will indeed hire people who aren't so great on looks if the boss knows that they can do the job (I knew the founder of Kingsoft and quite a few of his employees wouldn't win any beauty contests at any age and more than a few were paunchy but they obviously get the job done).
There is another reason that it is difficult to hire people that have severe physical limitations: try finding an office building of any size in any district with a wheelchair ramp, wheelchair accessible elevators or bathrooms (oh yeah, try squatting as a parapalegic).
The West is just starting to make use of high speed internet connections so that people with missing limbs, wheelchair bound, dwarfism, etc can be productive from their homes (and many do IT, quantative or customer service work).
In China, despite what you read about the huge number of internet users, most of those users do their internet stuff in an internet bar, not from home.
John Kuan - June 23, 2007 9:02 PM
That's right - take advantage. You will get better qualified employees who are more loyal. Besides, your company may get good publicity.
Technically, accommodations for physically disabled is not a big concern if they come looking for jobs. Most likely they have been used to the environment that is inconvenient to them and have found ways to work out the problems. I have a friend who is disabled due to infantile paralysis. He learned to ride a bike, swim, and play pingpong. He has a college degree in biology and is an ingenious software developer.
Another technical issue is on the Chinese hiring managers. Large companies in China often have Chinese middle or top managers. There attitudes may affect the process of hiring real good employees. If you want to take the advantage mentioned here, make sure your people are with you.
Wal-Mart has some diversity requirements for their suppliers (mostly from China). I wonder to what extend they are enforced or measured.
shah8 - June 23, 2007 10:45 PM
I will quibble with this somewhat...
In the U.S., employment discrimination is used to generate widespread pools of labor that is cheaper than they should be...black sharecroppers, female teachers/nurses, etc, etc. Violating the norms *will* harm some big fish's financial prospects and bring about retaliation for that personal and profitable act of good will.
It may be a stretch, but I would guess that it's the same in China, to some extent. Not so much as the US, since the economic structures here were, to some level, deliberatly constructed and imposed from above, and I don't think Chinese mandarins would have been as interested. The Hokou system is probably the largest source of discrimination, as well as glass ceilings. Credentialism (schools) has been the traditional sin of east asians, though.
As far as disabiities goes. I speak from personal experience, being hard of hearing, that pity really makes your gonads deflate. People don't hire disabled people because they have issues of fear/avoidance/pity towards the disabled. We're kinda like, you know...broken, spoiled. Not only that, it can be difficult to cultivate strong friendships and aquaintances that would help you find a job. Sure, you liked that paraplegic girl. But she had to study by herself, and probably had less close contact to other people, people who might bring word along. Sure, now that you read about her in the newspaper, perhaps yeah, you could use her. But you have to find out, and in a way that passes your filters.
If you want to hire disabled people you actually kinda have to go out of your way to do that. Do you have the time, and energy to do that?
China Law Blog - June 24, 2007 2:35 PM
nh --
1. I agree with you that discrimination will never go away and we all have some of them.
2. You meant to say that the harasser not the harassee comes from a prominent family, right?
3. You definitely make a good point regarding the existence of physical barriers in China.
China Law Blog - June 24, 2007 2:36 PM
John Kuan --
I did not know that about Wal-Mart and it would be interesting to know how successful they have been with it.
Law Office of Todd L. Platek - June 24, 2007 2:38 PM
One additional form of discrimination in China is less apparent but equally injurious: thought discrimination. The concept of correct thinking (si xiang dui) vs. incorrect thinking (si xiang bu dui) not only plagues workplaces, but most areas of society. Chinese employment law will more quickly respond to and cover physical disabilities, and I have faith in most Chinese employers having a soft spot for hiring an otherwise qualified worker despite a physical disability, if for no other reason than a hope that the employer's karma will improve. I have seen this custom practiced in many of my Chinese clients' offices and factories. I see less likelihood for thought discrimination to diminish, as such distinctions are considered more insidious.
China Law Blog - June 24, 2007 2:42 PM
shah8 --
You raise some very good points.
1. I did not claim and would never claim that the market will always work to end discrimination or even that every company can benefit by not discriminating.
2. I am not sure if you are asking that last question of me or rhetorically, but if of me, the honest answer is probably no. We are a small company and we hire from those who push our doors down. But, if we had need for 500 really top flight employees, I would be suggesting we beat the bushes.
astrid - July 6, 2007 7:47 PM
There's also age discrimination, particularly for management positions. In Chinese employment settings, supervisors prefer docile employees who are not a threat to their job position. They will almost always hire less qualified younger underlings rather than hire someone who is more able than they are.
You may be able to hire excellent middle managers who are a currently a bit behind their peers.
Hiring disabled and "villagers" could yield excellent results for certain positions and might result in a lower attrition rate. However, watch out for positions where they have to be in direct contact with prejudiced outsiders.
lanre - May 21, 2008 5:25 AM
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ANONYMOUS - April 2, 2011 9:07 PM
Height discrimination is also rampant in China.