Li Jing, 45, spends several hours each day doing domestic work for different families, earninga monthly income of 300 yuan (36.14 US dollars).
"I like the job," said Li, who has been laid-off from a local copper factory for eight years. Her income, however, is a little higher than 200 yuan (24.09 US dollars), the minimum to guarantee normal life in Shenyang, capital of northeast China's Liaoning Province. It can ensure warmth and meals and her child's education.
Liaoning, the traditional heavy industry base, is home to one-tenth of China's big-and-medium-sized state-owned enterprises. Industrial reconstruction has lead to more than 1 million jobless workers, with another 200,000 coming on the market every year.
Recently people have been seeking jobs in the service industry,including domestic services and restaurants, putting aside the stereotype that service jobs were inferior.
Among the 576,000 new jobs created in the past seven months, over 68 percent came from the service industry.
The service industry usually calls for few skills, suitable forlaid-off workers, who mostly have weak education background," saidGao Fengxiang, a senior counselor in a local employment agency.
The government has left no efforts to tackle the problem, pledging to foster labor-intensive industries, especially those can provide enough job opportunities, according to Wen Shizhen, secretary of the Liaoning provincial committee of the Communist Party of China.
A draft on employment was released recently by the provincial government, aiming to create 3 million new jobs, with 1.8 million from service areas during the Tenth Five-Year Plan (2001-2005).
Governmental sectors have sponsored various training classes tohelp laid-off workers to gain techniques useful for re-employment.