It is early in the morning, but she has already begun her work for the day, busily sweeping and cleaning the office.

 

She is He Genqin, who has confronted great hardships in her life. She lost her job years ago and failed to find a new one due to her low educational level and old age. A widow, she also found it very difficult to pay for her son's studies at Peking University.

 

Luckily, it was Chengdu Women's Employment Service Center that helped He Genqin find a way out of this despair. After training at the center, she worked as a housekeeper in Beijing for two years before returning to work for the center, which provided her with free accommodation.

 

He Genqin is hardworking and dedicated, and highly praised by clients. She can now earn over 1,000 yuan a month with part-time jobs on weekends and, most importantly, she can confidently finance her son's education.

 

He Genqin is just one of the hundreds of thousands of women who have benefited from the employment service center's assistance program.

 

Road to emancipation 

 

Established in January 2000, Chengdu Women's Employment Service Center has been successful in notching up a number of achievements, despite many twists and turns in its path. Under the direct guidance of the city's authorized women's organizations, the center provides daylong specific and professional services, helping more than 100,000 women from urban and rural areas find jobs.

 

Its top priority is to guide unemployed women in the right direction in career selection, helping them understand the nature of the modern housekeeping industry in particular.

 

In the past, most women would brave hunger to rather stay at home than do housework for others, in the fear that they would only earn low incomes or be faced with discrimination and possible deception.

 

Such misplaced traditional concepts blocked employment opportunities for women and intensified poverty. The center, therefore, has strived to help them develop proper concepts and values about modern housekeeping.

 

It has introduced them to relevant reports from authoritative media like China Central Television (CCTV) and People's Daily, and also to various professional competitions held in the sector.

 

This has helped many jobless women gradually realize the employment opportunities provided by the sector and its positive prospects, which has led them to believe that the industry will be able to earn public reputation and trust.

 

Further, the center attaches great importance to improving the women's qualifications and competitive edge through a variety of training programs, as only professional excellence and skills of a high level can assist jobless women find jobs more easily.

 

The center is focused on providing professional courses based on systematic theories as well as constant practice to hone the skills of trainees in order to lay a solid foundation for their future.

 

The women are also taught to improve their soft skills by cultivating a service-oriented spirit and consciousness of their role in society, learning good habits and polite manners, obeying basic principles, and always keeping their morale high.

 

By 2006, the center had seen 246 terms of training classes to produce 22,138 housekeepers, baby-sitters and cooks, some of whom even won awards in various professional competitions.

 

The center's trainees have all found jobs with income ranging from 550 to 2000 yuan, with 90 percent of them being successful in retaining their jobs.

 

In addition, the center has been engaged in expanding the employment space to meet the high market demand. A housekeeping service employee roster or "supermarket" as well as online registration and long-distance interviews have been organized to facilitate both employers and employees.

 

The original service hall has been renovated with 1 million yuan funds raised by the center itself. The rising demand for housekeepers has meant more opportunities for unemployed women. Also, new service projects have been developed in a bid to cover a wider area of daily life. Such actions have received great public appreciation.

 

Helpful measures

 

As its initial achievements show, Chengdu Women's Employment Service Center has taken great strides to create a more favorable environment for women's employment.

 

The center has devised a system of scientific management to enhance the sense of responsibility and lower the turnover of its workers by implementing various effective measures, including service-tracking mechanism, station-graded wage system, clients' evaluation mechanism and stimulation system.

 

Based on these measures, the amount of salary earned would greatly depend on the performance of the workers. At present, 95 percent of professional babysitters recruited from this center serve 3,000 clients in Chengdu and earn incomes ranging from 1,000 to 2,000 yuan.

 

Besides housekeeping services, the center has also launched employment intermediary services to extensively increase the rate of employment. The establishment of the first national market for female labor has made it possible to provide 5,000 jobs per month, the highest by any center of its kind in southwest China.

 

The market holds regular recruitment meetings, and tries to build regional cooperation for labor export.

 

Meanwhile, great attention has been paid to protecting the special rights of women, especially those from rural areas.

 

For instance, a labor union was founded in April 2006 under the direct leadership of the center to help newcomers get familiar with the work environment as soon as possible.

 

Moreover, this center has cooperated with many universities to explore ways to further promote the housekeeping industry. Great efforts have been made to earn preferential governmental policies and provide theoretical support for the development of the housekeeping industry.

 

Meanwhile, working with women's associations at different levels is high on its agenda, as it tries to develop a network to create more employment opportunities.

 

Honors galore

 

In the past six years, Chengdu Women's Employment Service Center has received different honors as tribute to its extraordinary development.

 

They include being named as one of the first batches of housekeeping experiment units by the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, and being designated a national career training base for women by the All-China Women's Federation, as well as a training base for labor development. It has also been recognized as a model base for re-employment training by the Sichuan provincial government.

 

(China Daily March 30, 2007)