What are the common problems for migrant workers returning home to start businesses?
With the introduction of the "Opinions of the General Office of the State Council on Supporting Migrant Workers and Other Personnel in Returning Home to Start Businesses," migrant workers returning home to start businesses are considered under the broad background and overall framework of mass entrepreneurship and innovation. For a special group like migrant workers, who have little capital, lack entrepreneurial knowledge, and do not have high entrepreneurial skills, starting a business is very difficult. Below, let us take a look at what problems migrant workers face when returning home to start businesses.
Difficulty with startup capital
1. Insufficient personal income: Migrant workers' personal income is insufficient to cover the costs needed to start a business. Although they have accumulated some funds when returning home, for the capital needed to establish an enterprise and engage in production and operation, these savings are only a drop in the bucket.
2. Insufficient working capital: Once migrant workers' enterprises are established, they have difficulty operating because of a lack of working capital. Enterprises founded by people returning home after working elsewhere are all small and medium-sized enterprises. The possibility of obtaining loans through formal financial channels is extremely small, and they painfully miss many business opportunities.
Project selection problems
1. Most projects chosen by migrant workers returning home to start businesses are related to fields and farmland. Because migrant workers have worked in cities for many years, they have seen the world, but their income still remains at a relatively low level. For them, the safest entrepreneurship may be to start from the fields and farmland they were once most familiar with, but most of these projects are low-profit projects, with small scale, a single product, long cycles, slow returns, and great susceptibility to market influence, which is not conducive to helping migrant workers get rich and increase income as quickly as possible. In addition, the technical content is relatively low, and it is also relatively difficult to enjoy national policy support.
2. In returning home to start businesses, migrant workers show varying degrees of blind investment in setting up enterprises. Constrained by factors such as their own knowledge and management experience, when they accumulate funds and return home to start businesses, they lack sufficient understanding of market information, and also lack active and effective industrial guidance and project direction from the government. They often make decisions and judgments that do not fit local economic development and market demand, and there is blind investment to varying degrees.
3. Migrant workers returning home to start businesses often copy others' models. After seeing others make money in some aspect of entrepreneurship, driven by the desire to become rich, they also blindly follow suit. The enterprises are small in scale, low-level, and repetitive construction is serious. Once the local market becomes saturated and sales difficulties appear, development funds become difficult to resolve, and in the end they can only go bankrupt.
Entrepreneurial ability problems
1. Migrant workers have entrepreneurial awareness, but their own quality is relatively low. Returning migrant workers have undergone the baptism of society, economy, culture, and ideas in developed areas, and their abilities have improved somewhat, but their overall quality is still relatively low. According to the main data bulletin of the Second National Agricultural Census in 2008, among rural labor resources, those with a junior high school education or below accounted for 89%, and among migrant labor force, those with a junior high school education or below accounted for 90%.
2. Insufficient entrepreneurial experience. Migrant workers who work elsewhere are mostly engaged in low-end industries, with low technical content and relatively insufficient technical accumulation. Migrant workers also rarely have entrepreneurial practice activities while away, and even less reserve of entrepreneurial knowledge and entrepreneurial theory. They lack entrepreneurial experience and are often at a disadvantage in fierce market competition, making it difficult to accomplish much in establishing entities.
3. Lack of advanced enterprise operation and management knowledge. Some migrant workers returning home to start businesses master only a single skill and cannot operate and manage according to modern enterprise systems. Enterprises have serious short-term behavior, product quality is uneven, and entrepreneurship cannot withstand tests. Therefore, enterprises are often difficult to sustain and develop rapidly.
4. Lack of technical talent. The main sources of labor for most enterprises are returning migrant workers and local farmers. Most of the entities founded are low-profit projects, and the production structure is mainly labor-intensive and manual operation. The technical content of products is relatively low. The living standards, environment, and material and cultural conditions in the places where businesses are started lack competitive advantages and attractiveness. Local talent and high-quality labor still tend to go to developed areas, which has become an obstacle to the upgrading and development of enterprises.
5. Migrant workers returning home to start businesses receive relatively little training. According to surveys, some migrant workers who are eager to get rich and urgent to start businesses simply have no time to receive training, nor are they willing to "waste" time on training. The consequence is that when choosing projects for returning home to start businesses, they either aim too high or operate on too small a scale. The market competitiveness and risk resistance of products are not strong, and the momentum for enterprise development is insufficient.