According to Reuters, China’s young adult population is shunning the jobs their parents do.
Manufacturing jobs in China are plentiful, but often pay little and require long hours, repetitive tasks and injury risks.
Unfortunately for these businesses, younger workers are eschewing factory work for less physical roles, or for higher education.
Options to solve the problem seem to pose their own threats.
Investing in automation or increasing wages would add cost to the equation, reducing export-heavy China’s cost advantage globally.
China's Ministry of Education believes that, by 2025, there will be a shortage of close to 30 million manufacturing workers.
The U.S. has its own manufacturing workforce shortage but it’s much smaller by comparison.
Deloitte believes that American factories will face a gap of 2 million unfilled jobs by 2030.
