Residency rules a barrier to workforce expansion plans
Ameco Beijing, one of the main maintenance, repair and overhaul providers in China, plans to expand its workforce by 10% this year. But this target, necessary to support growth, may be difficult to achieve due to hiring problems specific to China.
Primary among them is the Chinese system of Hukou or registered permanent residence. Citizens are registered in particular regions. This excludes them from public services such as education and health benefits in other regions and they are not allowed to buy property there. This effectively restricts the mobility of the Chinese workforce as jobs become available and means that employers' recruiting options are limited.
"There is no liberalised labour market in China," says Ameco's executive director of personnel Andreas Meister. "People have no right to settle wherever they want without permission from the authorities. We can't just go to Shanghai and hire people to work in Beijing, so we are dependent on the Beijing labour market, which is limited. We need skilled and educated people."
As a joint venture between Air China and Lufthansa, Ameco has around 25 German staff on secondment from Lufthansa among its 4,000-strong workforce, but larger-scale recruitment of overseas staff is not feasible. "We cannot offer them wages and conditions they would find attractive," says Meister, "and we could not operate a two-tier system with one structure for Chinese workers and a separate one for the others. We have this problem with German staff we do have, but they are mostly senior management."
Ameco's solution to the problem is to develop its own technical staff. In 1999, it founded the Ameco Aviation College (AAC), with the help of development aid from Germany. "China lacks a proper vocational training system, so it is important we have an internal source to recruit from," says Meister. "This allows us to get around 110 graduates each year who are well-trained, especially in aircraft maintenance, and can go into production without much further training.
"We hope to double the number of graduates in a few years."
However, as the Chinese aviation market expands, competition for the best university graduates is becoming fiercer. "It's easy to buy an aircraft," says Meister. "It's not so easy to have enough pilots, crew or maintenance staff to operate them. Generally in China there are more university graduates than the market can swallow, but the problem is to get the good ones. They also tend to have less practical experience than Western graduates, so it can take some effort to get these young people used to the workplace."
Source: Flight International
