Manufacturing Enterprise Front-line Staff Salary Study

The demand for labor force has been continuingly increased with the fast development of Chinese economy. Meanwhile the labor cost rises accordingly as well. In the year of 2007 the enterprises in Zhujiang Delta GuangDong province of China where is gathering process manufacturing industries had to meet a new challenge of shortage of labor. The job-hopping has become more and more frequent no matter the companies have provided with relative higher promotion of salary rather than they did over the last few years. To my many years experiences of management in manufacturing enterprises, the first cause for employees to leave their job is due to unsatisfaction of salary. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to survey various linear workers for their views about the current salary and aim to search for methods to improve their salary satisfaction so as to reduce the turnover rate,labor cost and provide enterprises with practical and valuable advices.The linear workers here referring to the workers engaged in the manual work, especialy the workers working on the assembly line. this investigation uses the anonymous questionnaire survey procedure and the linear workers were asked about their views for salary (note: the salary in general including salary, wellfares e.t.). With many years management experiences of the linear workers and reference to relative salary management theory, I presented 10 choice-questions to the participates of the linear workers about the salary system which they are mostly concernd. Furthermore in order to get more feedback beside the designated 10 choice-questions, there is a place at the end of the questionnaire to allow surveyee to put forward their open suggestions. Through this research, I discovered that the salary satisfaction of the linear workers is not only determined by objective factors such as the enterprises' salary level, salary structure, salary form and salary system but also closely related with the worker's subjective expectated value on various aspects of salary system, so it is not the enterprise's absolute salary level which people usually thought. Therefore, the enterprises' salary system management must obtain from both objective and subjective aspects,and have the two aspects well managed.In the objective factors, enterprise should establish a salary system in terms of salary level, salary structure, salary scheme and salary form in compliance to both enterprise's development strategy and worker's pratical needs as well based on the enterprise's own situation. In the subjective factors, the worker's expectations on various aspects of salary must be systematically well managed.