State firms most of them unprofitable still employ about two-thirds of all urban workers in China.
Another problem: the government envisages urban workers retiring on nearly 60% of their final wage.
Unpaid wages are a common flashpoint for urban workers, as are arbitrary land grabs by the authorities in the countryside.
Social protection often aggravated inequalities, because pensions and health care flowed to affluent urban workers but not the really poor.
Not only are opportunities for rural workers going to go missing, but urban workers are going to lose jobs and opportunities as well.
China has one scheme for urban workers, another for non-workers and a third for rural folk, each administered by separate city or county governments.
ECONOMIST: Chinese consumption is about much more than shopping
Whereas civil servants and employees in state-owned firms used to make up nearly 80% of all urban workers, their share is now down to 20%.
That has left a huge gap in urban workers' social-security provision.
And despite the largely unequal paychecks drawn by Baby Boomers and Gen X, the gap is closing between male and female urban workers in their 20s.
Rising numbers of urban workers and the insidious spread of Anglo-Saxon fast-food habits are working against the old traditions of a glass with breakfast followed by a long lunch fuelled by a bottle or two.
Between 1995 and 2001 the number of state-owned and state-controlled enterprises fell by nearly two-thirds, from 1.2m to 468, 000, and the proportion of urban workers employed in the state sector fell by nearly half, from 59% to 32%.
Another indication of slum politics comes from recent developments in China where there is a growing movement among the urban migrant workers.
Japan has always had an unusually low unemployment rate, never hitting over 5.3% partly because of its policy of guaranteed employment in urban areas that forces workers to share jobs to keep more people employed.
Those in favor of a chained CPI argue that the current index, which considers the spending habits of urban wage earners and clerical workers, is outdated.
Others in the early 20th century saw that the law must reflect the new circumstances of an urban, industrialised America where workers were playthings in the hands of giant corporations.
ECONOMIST: A biography of Louis Brandeis: Let's look at the facts | The
The increase for a coming year is based on inflation between the third quarter of the prior year and the third quarter of the current year, as measured by the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, or CPI-W. In the third quarter of 2008 energy prices and the CPI-W spiked, giving beneficiaries a hefty 5.8 % COLA for 2009.
FORBES: Social Security: No COLA, No Payroll Tax Increase In 2011
More than half of the country's workers now reside in urban areas, as rural migrants move to cities for better employment opportunities.
This confirmed that the urban unemployment rate, including migrant workers, had indeed fallen from 7.3% in 2002 to 4.4% in 2005 (see chart).
The research was conducted by Melissa Ditmore, from the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center based in New York City and Dan Allman, from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.
This year, among large executive agencies, the Department of Housing and Urban Development had the highest percentage of delinquent workers at 4.4 percent.
With modern technology, knowledge workers and knowledge businesses can escape urban congestion and the high cost of living by moving to the open spaces.
Inspired by the Depression-era Farm Security Administration photography project, its photographers shot everything from small Midwestern towns, barrios in the Southwest and coal-mining communities in Appalachia to African-Americans in Chicago, urban renewal in Kansas City and migrant farm workers in Colorado.
Unemployment is low, and urban areas in particular bring more competition for competent workers.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development has the highest percentage of tax delinquent workers at 4.4 percent.
FORBES: Tax Day Vote: Should Tax Delinquent IRS Employees Be Fired?
However, urban unrest, such as recent riots by factory workers in the southern province of Guangdong, is now more common.
But Mr Scott who represents shipyard workers, government bureaucrats, rural gentry and urban poor in a district that reaches from Richmond 110 miles southeast to Norfolk may be an exception.
As Eugene Steuerle of the left-leaning Urban Institute points out, this system would treat two workers with the same total compensation whatever the mix of cash wages and benefits very differently.
Yet federal tax, Social Security, Medicare, pension and antidiscriminiation laws "discourage work at older ages and discourage employers from hiring older workers, " says Richard W. Johnson of Urban Institute.
An analysis of Asians working in Silicon Valley where by some estimates they now constitute a majority of computer industry workers finds this population moving further away from the urban core, particularly to areas with concentrations of single-family housing.
FORBES: The Changing Geography of Asian America: To The South And The Suburbs
应用推荐