In the first five months of the year, private companies have provided 86,000 new jobs in Shanghai, nearly one-third of the total new jobs, according to the Shanghai Labor and Social Security Bureau, as cited in Laodong Daily on Monday.

Over the past five years, among the nearly one million employees laid off by state-owned enterprises and collective companies, more than 700,000 have found jobs in private companies.

Last year, there were a total of 2.52 million private firm employees, freelancers and individual business owners, covering nearly one-third of the total workers in the city. Private companies have also accounted for more than one-third of the total job information released by public job agencies last year.

(Shanghai Daily June 8, 2005)