From our colleague Michael Schuman in Hong Kong, a look at what Asian countries are doing to minimize layoffs during the economic crisis. He writes:
In no country is the effort to save jobs more widespread than in China. The government recently estimated that 20 million migrant workers have lost their jobs as the global slowdown forces tens of thousands of factories to close. The response has been a government-led effort to prevent even more widespread losses. Last week, the central government’s powerful State Council ordered companies throughout the country to notify local government-backed labor unions if they planned to cut either 10% of staff or more than 20 employees. The directive also urged companies to use any proceeds from China’s $586 billion economic stimulus package to create as many jobs as possible.
The State Council’s directive came after several months of vigorous initiatives to keep people employed. Last month, Wang Dong, head of Beijing’s Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, announced that all state-owned enterprises in the Chinese capital are forbidden from laying off any of their 750,000 employees in 2009. In December and January, Premier Wen Jiabao visited local businesses in the city of Chongqing and in Jiangsu Province and pleaded with them not to “resort to redundancy easily, and to try to stabilize the employment situation by all means.”