Expert Commentary: Activating Service Consumption to Build a Stable Employment Foundation
Expert Commentary by Zhang Huaishui
This year's Labor Day holiday saw a surge in consumer spending across the country, with service industries such as tourism, catering, and entertainment experiencing particularly strong growth. From live streaming e-commerce to intelligent elder care, new formats and models are emerging in the service consumption sector, not only reshaping the economic landscape but also playing a crucial role in providing stable employment opportunities for many workers.
Firstly, there is a tight correlation between service consumption and job expansion.
On the demand side, China's consumer upgrade is giving rise to numerous job opportunities through a "fragmentation" effect. For example, during this year's Labor Day holiday, Chengdu International Airport Business Circle saw daily passenger traffic exceed 300,000 people, with nearby Ole Shopping Mall reporting single-day sales of over RMB 20 million. The concentrated outburst of consumer demand will inevitably lead to the creation of a large number of job opportunities, with research reports indicating that for every 1% increase in service industry growth, around 25% more job opportunities are created compared to manufacturing.
On the supply side, job expansion is driven by the "comprehensive" characteristics of the service industry. Service jobs have high flexibility and low barriers to entry, encompassing various forms such as part-time work, temporary labor, and platform orders, which can fully meet the needs of flexible workers. For instance, delivery personnel and ride-hailing drivers enjoy flexible working hours, making them a popular "side hustle" option for many people, including college graduates and young workers who are eager to accumulate experience and lay the foundation for their careers.
Furthermore, in order to fully activate the service consumption employment "reservoir," policy and market coordination are needed.
On the policy side, targeted policies can be implemented to precision-inject funds. For example, providing social insurance subsidies and rent reductions for home-based care and childcare services can help reduce enterprise labor costs; accelerating the formulation of new professions national standards, such as "research travel guides," can also promote job growth.
On the market side, encouraging platforms like Meituan and Didi to open up more crowd-sourced job opportunities, exploring cross-industry talent allocation mechanisms, and promoting vocational training centers jointly established by colleges and service industry enterprises, such as the "dual-system" model for hotel management personnel training, can all help address skill mismatch issues.
In addition, we need to focus on resolving structural contradictions and improving the effectiveness of the "reservoir." We can leverage big data dynamics monitoring to achieve precise labor allocation, solve the problems of labor shortages and employment difficulties simultaneously, and use regional employment heat maps to monitor job saturation rates in eastern service industries and talent gaps in central and western regions. At the same time, we should prioritize safeguarding the rights of flexible workers and building a stable foundation for the "reservoir."
Looking ahead, we should focus on transforming from a "reservoir" to a "living spring." By integrating service consumption and employment markets in depth, we can gradually form a dynamic balance between demand-driven supply and supply-creating demand. In the short term, we can rely on holiday promotions and travel seasons to quickly release consumer potential and stabilize job numbers; in the long term, we should cultivate sunrise industries such as elderly care and data annotation to build a "job-friendly" service industry ecosystem and achieve sustainable development.
Overall, doing well with employment "reservoir" work not only requires policy support but also needs to tap into market-driven forces. Only by making service consumption the accelerator of economic transformation and the stabilizer of social improvement can we write a high-quality employment script in the process of high-quality development.
Daily Economic News