Shanghai Helping the Hard-to-Market Help Themselves

The first time she lifted a dead body, she turned as cold as the corpse.

But Wang Qin wouldn’t let her staff see her shaking.

It was her job to comb the dead woman’s hair, cut her nails and put on her makeup.

“It was total cultural shock at first,” said the 46-year-old laid-off office clerk who now owns a funeral home. “I didn’t know how to do anything else. But I knew if I wanted to work, I had to find something no one else was willing to do.”

Immigrants all over the world have mastered that simple rule of survival. But China’s “iron rice bowl” generation is just now getting a crash course in it.

Five decades of Communist rule fostered a widespread culture of dependency. The members of the Chinese working class leaned on the state for cradle-to-grave social services. They savored their status as masters of the proletariat. They never expected to stoop so low--fending for themselves in a competitive market economy.

But the era of cushy state jobs is gone forever. Harsh economic reforms have produced an unemployment avalanche. Every year, the nation’s growing jobless figure swells up against an economy unable to generate enough jobs. Mass labor protests across the country, particularly in the northern rust belt, provide blunt reminders of the dire consequences China faces if the unemployed millions fail to adjust to the fall from a workers’ paradise.

A dynamic city with old-economy woes and new-economy wealth, Shanghai is in an ideal position to push its labor force toward more financial independence.

A first-of-its-kind program started by the city government and known as Project 4050 targets the least marketable members of China’s old command economy--women over 40 and men over 50. Lacking skills, they have long been tagged the weakest link in China’s bloated labor force and face the toughest time finding new work.

Rather than expecting them to make do on about $30 a month in unemployment benefits, the city urges them to become their own bosses. If they start a business and hire fellow 4050 workers, they can enjoy tax breaks and management guidance. Whether that be delivering food or dressing the dead, it’s up to them to figure out what the market needs and profit from it.

“Shanghai’s goal is to promote an entrepreneurial culture,” said Wang Zhenhuan, a project manager. “If 20% of the unemployed state workers could start their own businesses, they could help employ the rest of the 80%.”

Since it started last year, the program has produced more than 700 small businesses and about 33,000 jobs, according to Wang. That’s a drop in the bucket considering the city’s more than 1 million unemployed, but the Shanghai model is a closely watched experiment rich with lessons about the hardships of transforming an idle labor force.

“Any work is better than staying home and doing nothing,” 49-year-old Wang Zhiming said. From the time he was 17, he was a chef at Shanghai’s once renowned People’s Restaurant. But he was let go in 1996 after poor business forced the government to trim staff at the state-owned eatery.

For half the pay and twice the work, he became foreman at the Green Dining Table, a 4050 enterprise that cooks, packs and delivers school lunches. But Wang is learning to take pride in his job, hollering at and hustling five dozen workers, making sure they put hot meals into 7,000 children’s hands without a glitch.

“It was really hard to get used to,” Wang said, pausing only after the last truck drove off. “Now I tell my crew all the time, ‘If you don’t work hard today, you have to work harder tomorrow to find a new job.’ ”

But the iron rice bowl is a hard habit to break.

Many new entrepreneurs have discovered that it is easy to create jobs but much harder to find good help.

At the Green Dinning Table, washing the dishes became a daily test of the will to work.

When the first batch of 4050 workers saw the mountains of dirty trays, they chickened out and fled.

“They told me this work is not meant for humans,” said Han Zhiqiang, 51, who was laid off as the manager at a state-owned meat and produce market. He and his wife opened the lunch business last year on the top floor of a bankrupt clock factory.

“My wife and I had no choice but to roll up our sleeves and start washing,” Han said. “We didn’t finish until 3:30 in the morning.”

It’s easy to get lazy after staying home too long, said Ho Jingzhen, 46, a single mother who was laid off from a textile factory four years ago. She now wakes up every day before dawn to make soy milk from scratch for her Do Bao Bao beverage stand.

She said many job-seekers she has interviewed simply don’t understand what an employer needs. Some have told her upfront that they don’t want to work hard.

“The first thing they want to know is, ‘How much does it pay and is it tiring?’ ” said Ho, who is on her feet 18 hours a day, soaking beans, stirring soy, frying tofu and tending to customers. “Then they tell me they have this or that kind of health problem. Is it OK to give them only light tasks? I tell them, forget it!”

If it wasn’t for the tax breaks, many Project 4050 employers concede, they would hire migrant workers from China’s impoverished countryside. Like migrants everywhere, such employees tend to work harder for less.

“Even now, I count on only migrant workers to wash the dishes,” said Han, who like many other business owners supplements his staff with younger, non-4050 laborers who also function as role models for city “slackers.”

“They really appreciate the chance to work here,” Han said, “and they can eat a lot more bitterness.”

Former state workers, on the other hand, have been spoiled by the system.

“If they really want a job in Shanghai, they can find one within 24 hours,” said Dai Xianhua, a manager at a milk delivery service and a former manager at one of Shanghai’s leading government department stores. “But they don’t want just any job. The state pays them $100 a month for a family of three to do nothing. Why should they work six days a week for $60?”

Those willing to change, however, see Project 4050 as a great way to start over.

“I used to be the boss of an entire factory--even my wife and neighbors looked up to me,” said Pan Defu, 51, who lost his job after his machine factory went belly up. Then Wang Qin hired him to help her build her funeral business.

“I couldn’t tell my wife for six months what I was doing,” Pan said in the tiny storefront crowded with paper wreaths, ash boxes and silk robes for the dead. “In the old days, people like us [funeral workers] couldn’t even find anyone to marry. I stuck with it because I knew there is a market for what we do. More important than that, I needed the job to survive.”

Jiao Qiankun is literally a rocket scientist who spent more than 20 years at a remote test site. But the 58-year-old said he was downsized and returned to his native Shanghai with nothing.

“I gave my youth to my country and did everything the party asked me to do. Now I’m old, and I have no sense of security,” said Jiao, an overqualified bookkeeper and health inspector at the Green Dining Table. “If I stayed home and dwelt on my resentment, I might die early from heartache. It’s better to work and do something with my time.”