ABSTRACT
China’s market-oriented economic reforms have significantly changed the places within which workers are employed: hours and wages have changed, job security has been modified, levels of satisfaction with work have altered. All of these changes are likely to have some effect on workers’ lives at home. Other reforms, outside the workplace, have altered the structure of prices and opportunities through which workers’ households must navigate their life choices: the adoption of the principle of user pays, which has significantly increased the cost of education, housing and medical care, for example. Meanwhile, even broader social changes – people’s expectations about consumption and attitudes to the position of women in the workplace – have also influenced the choices that households make. Together, all of these changes have resulted in households having to rearrange their livelihood strategies in order to maintain some balance between income and expenditure as well as between the time and effort individuals spend at the workplace and at home.
