The group that moved to the cities for work in 1980s finds their pension accounts are largely empty and they have nothing back on the farm
By Lan Fang
CAIXIN Online - June 13, 2014
A generation of Chinese people from rural areas who moved to the big
cities to find work is reaching retirement age, but many are finding
they have been left outside the country's urban pension system despite
extensive reforms in recent years.
Zhang Shumin and her husband,
Liu Yuchen, spent over 20 years working as sanitation workers in Beijing
and live in a tiny room next to a public restroom they clean. The
natives of the northern province of Hebei are nearing retirement, but
have learned their employer never properly paid their pensions.
The
problem Zhang and her husband face is common among the county's first
generation of migrant workers, the people who left their rural homes to
look for jobs in big cities in the 1980s. These people mainly worked as
temporary contract workers, and have been left out of the basic pension
plan that started covering urban employees in the 1990s.
The
country adopted its first Social Security Law in 2011, but many migrant
workers have fallen between the cracks of local and national regulations
and face constant discrimination.
READ MORE...
No comments:
Post a Comment