Workers operate the intelligent production line at a factory in Changji City, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on Feb.13. Photo: CFP

As the 20th CPC National Congress report states, “To build a modern socialist country in all respects, we must, first and foremost, pursue high-quality development.” In fact, since the 18th CPC National Congress, China’s economic development has entered a new stage under the new development philosophy. The industrial structure has continuously been transformed and upgraded, the industrial layout has become more rational, and China has entered the fast lane of high-quality development on the path of Chinese modernization.

At the same time, against the backdrop of a complex and grim internal and external environment and significantly increasing uncertainties, high-tech manufacturing and equipment manufacturing, especially new-energy vehicles, industrial robots, integrated circuits, and microcomputers have achieved sustained and rapid growth, demonstrating the resilience of the Chinese economy and the advantages of Chinese modernization. 

Chinese modernization aims at common prosperity for all, where high-quality employment plays an important role. On the road of Chinese modernization, we must discover how to build a coupling relationship between high-quality economic development and high-quality employment.

High-quality employment

In recent years, China’s industrial structure has undergone fundamental changes. The manufacturing industry’s transformation from labor-intensive to technology-intensive, the emergence of new business forms and new occupations as the economic development mode upgrades, and the rapid growth of the platform economy reflect that the Chinese economy is entering the fast lane of development, which lays a solid foundation for promoting ordinary workers to achieve high-quality employment.

First, sci-tech progress and the popularization of technology, especially the wide application of robotics in various fields, greatly improves labor productivity and accelerates building a modernized economic system. The increasing penetration rate of applied robotics has a profound impact on employment quality for laborers. According to a report released by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), the number of industrial robots in China reached 943,200, and the density of robots in the manufacturing industry is 246 per 10,000 employees, ranking ninth in the world. The popularization of intelligent and automatic equipment has fueled high-quality economic and social development, and transformed China’s development pattern and growth power.

Second, the emergence of new business forms and new occupations represents advanced productive forces and the enhancement of the Chinese economy’s capacity for continuous innovation, with the orderly replacement of old and new growth drivers. Among new occupations which emerged in recent years, a considerable number are high-tech jobs related to the development of internet and digital technology, such as robot engineers and technicians, data security engineers and technicians, and digital solution designers. 

In addition, some new occupations reveal the new demand for vocational skills in sustainable development amid energy and economic structural transformation. For example, under the strategic goal of achieving carbon peak and carbon neutrality, new occupations such as “carbon sink meteorological assessor” and “comprehensive energy servicer” begin to gain traction, which reflects that “new green occupations” will become an important part of urban employment in the process of China’s green energy transition.

Third, the rapidly developing platform economy has become an important force that promotes stable employment in China. Platform enterprises’ capacity to provide jobs has added resilience for the sustained and high-quality development of the Chinese economy. In recent years, as internet technology progresses, the scale of platform enterprises has expanded rapidly, and so has the number of platform-related workers. The rapid development of the platform economy has created a large number of new employment forms with diverse and fine divisions of labor, which has effectively improved different levels of employment. As a result, platform employment is likely to become an important part of the future labor market. By the end of 2021, the number of workers employed by 10 top platform enterprises and their sub-branches remained above 200,000, among which the number of food delivery workers on main catering platforms reached 10 million.

In fact, the platform economy’s development not only creates a large number of jobs, but also promotes the rapid application of new technologies. The emergence and rapid growth of the platform economy is the result of scientific and technological progress. Its core competitiveness is the big data computing power and ability to match information based on internet technology, which also provides an industrialization path for big data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and other related technologies.

Hidden challenges

In the process of Chinese modernization, the coupling relationship between high-quality economic development and high-quality employment is fundamental. However, challenges loom, such as the short-term “employment substitution effect” due to robots and other intelligent manufacturing equipment, the way platform enterprises shock traditional labor relations, and the “algorithm control” of enterprises over workers in the digital economy era, threatening the sustainable career development of workers and the protection of labor rights and interests.

In the long run, advances in intelligent manufacturing and artificial intelligence technology will significantly improve production efficiency, creating more medium and high-end jobs and increasing the proportion of high-quality jobs. However, the short-term “employment substitution effect” of intelligent manufacturing will be evident. With the popularization of artificial intelligence technology, some low-end jobs will be gradually replaced by machines. Due to the “de-skilled nature” of their posts, the workers will experience “labor degradation” and become marginalized or auxiliary to machines. Meanwhile, the process of intelligent manufacturing’s application, popularization, and machine replacement has more of a “creation effect” than a “substitution effect” on high-skilled jobs, which intensifies the differentiated impact of technological progress on high-skilled and low-skilled workers. From the perspective of the likeliness of being replaced by machines, workers are divided into “core employees” and “marginal employees,” where the latter are more exposed to unstable and informal labor relations in the labor market.

In the rapid expansion of platform enterprises, a considerable number of firms prefer to establish “informal” labor relations with workers. The typical examples of this include car hailing drivers, food delivery workers, livestreaming hosts, and online content authors. Workers provide services for platform enterprises in the form of flexible employment with high instability, and bear part of the risks that should be borne by enterprises. To a certain extent, the rapid development of the new economic model, represented by platform enterprises, is due to “externalized” employment modes. Therefore, the scaled expansion of platform enterprises may not necessarily bring high-quality employment. Although platform enterprises succeed in cutting costs, such “informal” labor relations may lead to the forced acceptance of gig employment for workers and the lack of protection of labor rights and interests.

In the digital economy age, enterprises’ management philosophy is shifting from explicit bureaucratic management to implicit algorithmic control. At some big internet companies, “algorithmic” management and supervision are ubiquitous. Through an analysis of labor process data, some companies achieve efficiency by optimizing solutions. Though algorithm optimization, they can implement all-round “digital control” of their employees’ labor process. Some establish an “algorithm automatic decision” mechanism, from “algorithm recruitment,” “algorithm rewards and punishments,” to “algorithm assessment” and “algorithm layoffs,” digital tools cover all links of enterprise labor relations. In essence, this practice establishes a management system prioritizing efficiency and labor value maximization to ensure overall control over the labor process.

Balanced economic development, employment

While further optimizing China’s economic structure, the coupling of high-quality economic development and high-quality employment is the only way to achieve the strategic goal of significantly expanding the middle-income group. It is of great practical significance to reduce the proportion of households in the state of relative poverty and steadily promote common prosperity in China. 

In the knowledge economy era, labor skills have become the core factor that determines the quality of employment. With the popularity of machine substitution, improving employment quality for workers and enhancing ordinary workers’ sense of security, sense of gain, and sense of value through technology is a heatedly discussed academic issue. Human-centric or machine-centric approaches represent two different technological paths. When workers become simple handlers of machines, knowledge and skills will be completely excluded from the labor process. In such a scenario, labor efficiency will be improved but not the quality of employment. Moreover, skill turnover is more frequent. Developing knowledge-based, skill-based, and innovative workers and establishing targeted vocational skills training are the keys to high-quality development.

With the rapid development of internet technology, the platform economy has higher factor allocation efficiency and better system integration compared to traditional enterprises. American scholar Nick Srnicek put forward the concept of platform capitalism, arguing that platform enterprises will become the core form of economic and social development, and may become the dominant economic and social organization form, like Fordism, in the near future. 

However, from the perspective of employment quality, the innovation of employment modes in the development of the platform economy should not be a way to transfer enterprise costs, nor should it violate the value principle of fairness and justice or harm the legitimate rights and interests of workers. We must protect the legitimate rights and interests of this new type of worker, who engages in flexible employment, as an important prerequisite to helping the majority of platform workers to achieve high-quality employment.

As various algorithms penetrate all dimensions of the economy and society, scientific and accurate supervision of algorithms is an important part of the modern social governance system. In government supervision of employment, the traditional focus on the execution of labor contracts and the protection of wages and salaries should not be the only considerations. Rather, the influence of algorithms on all aspects of the workers employment experience should be considered. 

That said, the supervision of “algorithm control” in the labor process needs to be strengthened, striving to empower workers through algorithms, rather than trapping workers in algorithms and systems at the expense of their legitimate rights and reasonable demands. At the same time, in the process of enterprises’ digital transformation, increasing democracy in algorithm formulation and encouraging the participation and recognition of workers is a new challenge when pursuing high-quality employment.

Cui Yan is an associate research fellow at the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Edited by YANG XUE