Jeune Street

It's been quiet on Jeune Street lately, but it's worth breaking the silence to highlight this fascinating peek at the changing Chinese migrant labour market:

The supply of workers 16 to 24 years old has peaked and will drop by a third in the next 12 years, thanks to stringent family-planning policies that have sharply reduced China’s population growth.

In Zhongshan, many factories are operating with vacancies of 15 to 20 percent, compelling some bosses to cruise the streets in their BMWs and Mercedeses in a desperate hiring quest during crunch time.

The other new reality, perhaps harder to quantify, is this: young Chinese factory workers, raised in a country with rapidly rising expectations, are less willing to toil for long hours for appallingly low wages like dutiful automatons.