China’s Reforms Bring Big Step Back for City Women

The latest TV series to hit this northern Chinese port city isn’t likely to be a ratings blockbuster.

Its Tuesday morning slot isn’t quite prime time. Its stars don’t qualify as celebrities. And the show’s premise--how to become the perfect maid or other domestic worker to serve the growing middle and upper classes--hardly promises a broad audience.

But the producers of “Household Service Training Lecture” have a different definition of commercial success: jobs for some of the tens of thousands of women who have been thrown out of work by China’s economic reforms.

“Even being a housekeeper is a contribution to society,” said Yang Jingsui of the Tianjin Municipal Women’s Federation, one of the sponsors of the program, which began airing in September. “Household service is especially suitable for older women.”

The world’s most populous nation is discovering that its struggle to build a market economy is hitting one group very hard: urban women.

Unlike women from the countryside, for whom China’s dizzying changes are creating a wealth of opportunity, millions of urban women have lost their jobs over the past few years. They’ve become victims of massive downsizing in money-losing state enterprises and, in some cases, outright sexism. Usually the lowest-skilled workers in the least profitable industries, women are receiving pink slips at a much faster rate than their male counterparts.

A recent study found that while women make up 40% of the urban and industrial work force, they account for 60% of its laid-off laborers, a bitter reversal of fortune for women who not long ago were members of China’s “leading class,” the proud proletariat of the Communist revolution. After years of toil in blue-collar jobs, many female city-dwellers face a loss of their income, and with it a sharp drop in status at home and in society--their usefulness diminished in the eyes of family and friends.

For some, the prospect of being a maid harks back to the bad old days of servitude to the upper crust that communism swept away. But the prospect of unemployment is even worse.

“I couldn’t handle it,” said a woman who identified herself only by her family name, Sun, as she recalled her dismissal five years ago from a state-run tool factory after 16 years of service. “I didn’t feel there was any hope.”

Gone were her self-esteem and the assurance of cradle-to-grave welfare, including everything from health care to fresh fish on national holidays. These days, Sun, like scores of other laid-off women in Tianjin, hawks souvenirs from a sidewalk kiosk, resigned to the fickle tastes of tourists.

“Tianjin’s economy is in a recession. I don’t have many customers,” said Sun, 45. “Sometimes I make money; sometimes I don’t.” Nearby, another woman, who declined to give her name, tried to interest passersby in some soda, ice cream or cough lozenges. After 10 months, “I don’t want to work this stand anymore,” she said, sighing and yearning for her old job assembling spare parts for China’s most famous bicycle brand, the Flying Pigeon.

The plight of such city women contrasts with the situation of rural women. Migration, particularly to the “special economic zones” along China’s coast, has offered millions of rural women a chance to escape a life of hard work on the farm. Demanding little in the way of pay or benefits, they have become an important source of cheap, entry-level labor in the burgeoning private sector and, in some cases, have taken the place of laid-off urban women in the state-owned and collective enterprises.

Laid-Off Women Lose Status

The new problems of city women have rung alarm bells within the Communist regime, which has long trumpeted the improved status of women as a benchmark of its progress. Advocates for women fear economic change jeopardizes some of the dramatic gains since the days of foot-binding and concubinage--practices rooted out just this century.

Factor in the marital and psychological troubles that beset unemployed women, triggering divorce and even suicide, and the result is a combustible social issue. Unrest has risen along with unemployment in recent years, and authorities are hoping to keep it from increasing further.

“Our municipal government is paying close attention to this problem,” said Yang, of Tianjin’s women’s federation. “Our measures to find work for laid-off women are the top priority on the agenda.”

In Tianjin alone, an estimated 190,000 women have lost their jobs, about 59% of all the city’s laid-off workers.

An industrial port of 6 million people, Tianjin, like many Chinese cities, is a sometimes improbable mesh of old and new, where graceful, colonnaded old banks from its days as a European entrepot rub up against squat new buildings like Sgt. Pepper’s Music Hall. Rickety-looking taxis jockey with donkeys hauling carts piled with straw.

In recent years, Tianjin’s shaded streets also have made room for the dozens of roadside stands run by women like Sun.

Most Receive No Compensation

Only women whose former factories have not gone completely bust are lucky enough to draw subsidies ranging from $22 to $33 monthly, or other benefits. The majority receive no compensation, and cop odd jobs where they can.

“They’ve become like migrant workers,” said Guo Jianmei, director of the Center for Women’s Law Studies and Legal Services at Beijing University.

Or worse. In many ways, the curbside stands started by laid-off urban women are the negative equivalent of the roadside shops opened by village women who have returned home from city jobs. While such a shop is a sign of independence for rural women, the city street stalls symbolize what so many of their urban sisters have lost.

Throughout China, layoffs have been heaviest in light industries such as textiles and machinery, and in the trade and service sectors, all of which heavily employ women. Local and provincial authorities have been quick to shut down or slash such state-owned and collective enterprises awash in red ink.

Besides being a drain on the national budget and a hindrance to economic growth, these failing enterprises threaten one of the most vulnerable pieces of the Chinese economy--the banking sector. To keep people working, China’s banks have been making unrecoverable loans to companies that would have been declared bankrupt long ago in the West, endangering the banks’ own solvency.

China’s economic czar, Premier Zhu Rongji, has promised to eliminate money-losing businesses within three years.

“On the surface, the structural reforms target unprofitable enterprises,” said Ding Juan, an associate professor with the Women’s Studies Institute of the All-China Women’s Federation, a government-backed organization. “When they made the policy, however, they didn’t take into account the history of the industries being targeted, in which women’s participation is particularly high. So in practice it has had a discriminatory effect.”

In factories where both men and women work, experts say, women often get fired first, particularly when a husband and wife work at the same plant.

Sun was one of 70 to 80 women laid off out of about 100 workers who lost their jobs at her factory. Too dispirited to look for work, she languished at home for two years before taking over the souvenir stand from her husband, who started breeding dogs as a longer-term investment.

In a good month, Sun can make as much as $85, substantially more than her old factory salary of $67. However, she still is wistful about the old days.

“The system before was safe and stable,” she said. “Here there are no days off. At the factory, you got off at 5, and you could still take care of your home. Here you can’t; I go home tired and don’t feel like doing anything.”

She has even less energy to quarrel with her husband, with whom she fought constantly after she was first laid off. For a time, they argued over money; he often withheld it from her.

When asked in a survey last year if their marriages suffered after they were fired, three out of four women workers in Tianjin said yes. In more extreme cases around the country, husbands turn violent or seek mistresses.

“Laid-off women don’t just lose their jobs. They also lose status within their households,” said Beijing University’s Guo. “Her mother-in-law looks down on her, her father-in-law looks down on her, her husband looks down on her.”

Women between 35 and 50 often remain out of work for two years or more, according to the central Ministry of Labor. Unlike in the United States, job advertisements openly express a preference for candidates of a particular sex and age.

“The law hasn’t kept up with the [economic] changes,” said Guo, whose legal center has taken several cases of alleged sex discrimination to court.

Many Won’t Take Service Jobs

Thousands of women have turned to retraining centers to learn skills from data entry to restaurant service. Official media flash images of laid-off women happily wrapping dumplings and mopping floors. In reality, many women have a tough time accepting such jobs.

“There are plenty of jobs, but most people won’t take them,” said Ba Xinmin, 46, who worked at an electronics factory in Beijing until earlier this year and now works as a maid.

Tianjin officials like to tout the example of Zhao Yujuan, a merry, resourceful 45-year-old who turned her pink slip into a red letter. She opened a dumpling shack six years ago that has since blossomed into a perpetually busy restaurant with two branch locations. To give back to society, she says in a lickety-split speaking style larded with laughter, she now employs 18 laid-off women out of a staff of 24 at her main eatery.

Success stories like Zhao’s, however, are the exception.

“As a feminist, I’m not happy,” said Ding, the professor. “In the media, they tell the audience that women can get new jobs--but what kind of jobs? Slaughtering pigs, baking bread. The quality of jobs is much lower.”

But the jobs help put food on the table, which explains why more than 3,000 women signed up for an exam and hope to earn a certificate at the end of the three-month “Household Service Training Lecture” series.