How do Migrants Find Jobs? A Study of Kinship Ties and Job Searching Process

• In Event: 571 - Section on Economic Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. Social Networks in Job Searching and Career Trajectories

Abstract

How people find jobs is a prosaic problem. Previous research identified human capital as an effective signal in the high-end labor market because of the heterogeneous characteristics of positions and job seekers. In the low-end labor market, where the level of human capital accumulated by workers is comparatively homogeneous, questions arise: how can blue collar workers, and in the specific context of rural migrants in China, be identified, selected by employers? On the supply side of the low-end labor market, a symmetric question exists. How can migrant rural workers, as sojourners to a town, a city or an industrial cluster, efficiently target, approach and secure a job in the vast ocean of firms? In this paper, I try to answer these questions by focusing on the supply side of the labor market, investigating the mechanism of job searching process. By surveying rural migrants in a textile firm in Zhejiang Province, China, I find that personal ties, especially kinship ties, as one of the varying forms of social ties, play a key role in saving rural migrants’ time spent on job-search and determining wage levels in the firm. Human capital, in comparison, exerts less influence than kinship ties do. In order to explain these findings, I further investigate the mechanism underlying the job-searching process from two aspect, including the efficient and secured dissemination of information among family members and relatives, and the guarantee mechanism which provides a safety net for rural migrants and leads to low transaction cost for prospective employers.

Author

• Renling Zhang, Cornell University