New Forms of Employment from the Perspective of China’s Industrial Revolution

By Tian Zhipeng

Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing

The new round of industrial revolution, characterized by informatization, digitization, and intelligence, has become a new engine for global economic growth, and China's traditional industrial model is also undergoing rapid transformation. In 2023, the number of mobile internet users in the Chinese mainland has reached 1.091 billion. Various applications based on mobile terminals are driving and influencing different industries, giving rise to various new forms of employment. The career development of workers in new employment formats mainly presents the following three characteristics.

Firstly, the typical feature of workers in new forms of employment is that work must be completed through the internet platform. According to China's current labour related legal system, standard employees refer to those who sign labour contracts with employers, and other kinds of workers are usually classified as flexible employees. Workers who complete the labour process on the internet can be either standard employees or flexible employees. According to the data from the national large-scale social survey called “Chinese Social Survey” (CSS) in 2023, 11.78% of Chinese citizens aged 18 to 69 who are engaged in non-agricultural work accounting for new forms of employment. According to China's "Seventh National Population Census" data (2020), there are about 520 million non-agricultural workers, and it can be roughly estimated that the total size of China's new employment forms of workers is around 60 million, and the number is still rapidly increasing. Taking the two typical new professions of food delivery drivers and ride hailing drivers as examples, the number of catering and food delivery service personnel in China was only 125000 in 2018, but by the end of 2021, this number had increased to 13 million. According to the IPO prospectus of China's largest ride hailing platform DiDi, by the end of 2021 first quarter, DiDi has 13 million active drivers in China. These workers work with the assistance of smart phones and internet platform enterprises.

Secondly, compared with traditional non-platform workers, new forms of workers show characteristics such as youthfulness, higher education, gender balance, and high levels of population mobility. 63.45% of the new industry workers belong to agricultural household registration, and 15.07% and 18.07% belong to inter-county and inter-provincial mobility respectively. This indicates that the new employment model not only provides more diverse employment opportunities for highly educated young workers, but also offers new employment opportunities for a large number of agricultural migrant populations in the central and western regions, promoting balanced development between regions and urban and rural areas as well. The five most common occupations for new industry workers are “wholesale and retail service personnel”, “transportation, warehousing, logistics, and postal service personnel”, “engineering and technical personnel”, “residential service personnel”, and “accommodation and catering service personnel”. The development of new business types has given new impetus to the transformation and upgrading of traditional service industries. For example, with the development of internet platform economy, people engaged in wholesale and retail services have new opportunities for online e-commerce or live streaming sales; personnel engaged in catering services have gained new opportunities to utilize food delivery platforms to provide catering services; personnel engaged in transportation services have gained new opportunities to drive ride hailing services; personnel engaged in residential services have gained new opportunities for delivering take-out. These have greatly improved the labour productivity of the service industry.

Thirdly, workers in new business forms tend to choose higher income rather than higher social security. According to the CSS data collected in 2023, compared with workers in traditional standard employment, the participation rate of workers in new forms of employment in work-related injury insurance and unemployment insurance is 23.60% and 22.81% lower respectively, but their average monthly income is about 700 RMB higher. There are two reasons for this, at the individual level, new industry workers are relatively young, in good physical health, have low demand for social insurance, and expect to earn more income; at the institutional level, the proportion of cross provincial mobility among workers in new business models is very high, and there are still some institutional barriers to participating in social insurance plans which require paying the insurance fees at registered residence provinces, autonomous regions or municipality directly under the central government (i.e. Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Chongqing). At the same time, many regions in China have launched pilot projects for new industry workers to participate in various types of social insurance, and the pilot experience in each region will definitely provide experience for the reform of the social security system for new industry workers at the national level.

The emergence and development of new employment forms have shown great potential for improving labour productivity and improving people's livelihoods, but they also pose challenges to traditional employment and social insurance systems. Based on its own national conditions, China is actively exploring governance methods to safeguard the rights and interests of workers in new forms of employment. Under the rapid development of the global digital economy, these are undoubtedly common opportunities and challenges faced by countries around the world.

* Tian Zhipeng, Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.