Abstract
The current scholarship on inequality of occupational attainment between rural migrant workers (RMW) and urban resident workers (URW) is largely dominated by evidence suggesting a landscape of occupational segregation, whilst there is a lack of studies researching the equality of occupational mobility. To fill this gap, this study compares the occupational mobilities between RMW and URW in China's urban labor market. Three heatmaps are used to visualize the differences between these two groups in the outflow distributions of occupational mobility. The results show a marked disadvantage of RMW's mobility into white-collar occupations and a relatively high tendency for them to move to or to stay in the manual and agricultural occupations.
Highlights
Inequality between rural migrant workers (RMW) and urban resident workers (URW) is a well-known significant issue in urban China
Chi-squared test results are attached to indicate whether the conditional RMW-URW difference seems reliable in the population
Whilst previous literature fails to provide empirical evidence of equality between RMW’s and URW’s occupational mobilities, this brief research report makes a contribution to the field by updating the findings on the differences in occupational mobility between RMW and URW in urban China
Summary
Inequality between rural migrant workers (RMW) and urban resident workers (URW) is a well-known significant issue in urban China. RMW are defined as those who still have an “agricultural” hukou status but work as non-agricultural workers in the urban areas, while URW are those who have non-agricultural hukou status in cities (China Labor Bulletin, 2020). There has been a known phenomenon of massive rural-to-urban migration for job opportunities and economic life chances improvement. Most of the rural migrants failed to change their hukou status to nonagricultural Speaking, those with an agricultural hukou status in cities are still classified as “temporary” or de facto residents in cities (Chan, 1996). Rich empirical evidence (e.g., Chan, 1996, 2009; Li, 1999, 2004; Démurger et al, 2009; Liu, 2017) has consistently documented a pattern of occupational segregation in urban China, noting that RMW are more likely to take low-income and unskilled “3-D” (dangerous, dirty, and demeaning) manual labor jobs, whereas urban populations’ occupations are generally highly skilled and exhibit good economic remuneration
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