Wed, May 12, 2010
BEIJING, May 12 (Xinhua) -- The proportion of China's GDP that goes towards wages and salaries has continued to shrink since 1983, a senior trade union official said here Wednesday.
According to Zhang Jianguo, chief of Collective Contracts Department with the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), the proportion of the country's GDP that makes up wages and salaries peaked at 56.5 percent in 1983 and dropped to 36.7 percent in 2005.
"That proportion hasn't changed too much since 2005," Zhang said in an interview posted on the ACFTU's website, adding the proportion of returns on capital in GDP had risen by 20 percent in 27 years ending 2005.
According to a survey released by ACFTU Wednesday, almost one fourth of Chinese employees had not seen a salary rise in the past five years.
Zhang said it was very difficult to promote the capital-labor negotiation system for determining employee wages, the most effective way of increasing workers' salaries.
By 2009, there were a total of more than 1.2 million collective contracts nationwide, covering more than 2.1 million enterprises and 161 million employees.
Low pay, long working hours and poor working conditions were partly to blame for the shortage of migrant workers in areas of the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta at the beginning of this year, Zhang said.
When delivering the government work report this March, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao vowed to reform the income distribution system and gradually increase wages and salaries.
In the first quarter of 2010, seven provinces and municipalities such as Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai had increased their minimum-wage standards by 10 percent to 17 percent while another 20 provinces planned to adjust their minimum-wage level this year, according to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.
