City welcomes migrant workers back, encourages skilled personnel

A chartered flight carrying 100 migrant workers from Yunnan Province touched down at Pudong International Airport on Saturday, opening the city's annual campaign to welcome migrant workers back after the Spring Festival.

The workers were welcomed by local officials led by Yang Jiaying, director of the Shanghai Human Resources and Social Security Bureau, who presented them with festival gift packages encouraged them to settle down in their job and keep learning vocational skills to achieve excellence.

Accompanied by officials and enterprise staff, the workers took shuttle buses to their residences offered by their employers.

More chartered flights, trains and buses will pick up more migrant workers from provinces like Anhui, Sichuan, Hunan, Henan and Gansu, according to the Shanghai Human Resources and Social Security Bureau.

To meet the need for talented personnel by enterprises in Shanghai after the Spring Festival, the city has sent teams to other provinces for recruitment and vocational training since December last year, leading to increased and earlier chartered vehicle services for returning workers, said the bureau.

It said more efforts will be put into connecting local employers' need for talent with the supplies of workforce from outside of Shanghai.

After workers arrive in Shanghai, authorities will arrange subsidized, customized training according to the need of employers, and career plans of employees, to help them settle.

More than 110 job fairs will be held around the city with more than 100,000 job vacancies available, said the bureau.