To better boost employment and ensure social security for laborers and laid-off workers, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security has set six key tasks on building a social security system as the followings:

• Establish municipal, district and community-level public employment agencies in all large and middle-size cities and qualified smaller cities. Employment information exchange should then be easily accessed, progressively, in 100 large cities throughout the network.

• Fine tune requirements and streamline paperwork procedures for the laid-off and unemployed laborers and further clarify and improve preferential reemployment policies.

• Hammer out training subsidy measures to provide free reemployment training. National Self-employment Demonstration Bases will be set up in qualified cities to facilitate the laid-off and unemployed laborers to engage in self-run small business.

• Enforce unemployment insurance. Qualified unemployed laborers who run out of their unemployment insurance after a period of unemployment should be protected by the urban minimum living standard security system.

• Encourage laborers, especially self-employed and flexible-working laborers, to join social insurance schemes.

• Take measures to help laid-off workers from state-owned enterprises to join basic medical insurance schemes after they are reemployed as part-time and seasonal workers.

(China.org.cn by Alex Xu, August 22, 2003)