(Bloomberg) -- Pressure is mounting in China’s labor market, at least if you go by how often people are looking for jobs online.
Frequency of searches for the term “find a job” surged to the highest ever in April, according to an index compiled by the nation’s dominant search engine Baidu Inc., which handles billions of searches a day. Google is not accessible for most Internet users in China due to government censorship.
That adds to evidence of job market stress already showing up in the official economic data: the employment sub-gauge of the official manufacturing purchasing managers’ index tumbled to the lowest level since the aftermath of the global financial crisis in May, and that sub-index of the non-manufacturing gauge also sank to the worst in more than three years.
The ratio of job vacancies to job seekers declined to 1.68 in the first three months of this year, versus 2.38 in the fourth quarter of 2018 and 1.91 a year earlier. That’s the lowest level since early 2015, when leading online recruiter Zhaopin.com starting releasing the data.
Jobs are a red line issue for China’s leadership, which is extremely sensitive to any social unrest that large-scale unemployment could trigger. Last month, China established a leading group headed by a vice-premier to support employment and vowed to “defend the bottom line of avoiding massive lay-offs.” Top economic officials unusually request provinces keep migrant workers in their work locations and avoid them returning to hometowns “in large waves.”
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