Abstract:

The formation of skills, especially specific skills, requires individuals to take root in a certain position for a long time of cultivation and exploration, which requires providing workers with a relatively stable work environment and employment security. In the planned economy period, state-owned enterprises in China implemented a planned employment system of unified contracting and allocation. Enterprises adopted methods such as labor competition, in-factory apprenticeship, and technical cooperation to promote individual skill formation. In the socialist market economy period, public-owned enterprises provided institutional guarantees for employment stability for some technical and skilled talents through Bianzhi system. At the same time, they further continued and innovated skills competitions, apprenticeship systems based on expert studios, and professional title evaluation systems to promote the formation of employees’ skills. Non-public owned enterprises, on the other hand, provided employees with reliable promises of stable employment through signing long-term contracts, prohibition of competition, and other measures, and by strengthening employee loyalty education, establishing internal channels for talent growth and mobility, establishing internal talent training systems and labor markets, and other measures to improve the efficiency of employee specific skills formation. Essentially, this is a re-balancing between the commodification and de-commodification of labor within enterprises in the socialist market economy environment. Enterprises respect and protect the characteristics and needs of workers as individuals with stable employment commitments, and leverage the value of labor as a factor of production through four mechanisms: apprenticeship inheritance, career development, championships, and internal recruitment. This mechanism is also influenced by the macro level of the national economic system and the standardized and orderly internal labor market within the industry. In the future, China’s employment policies, education policies, and social security policies should focus on promoting stable employment for social groups. It helps to build healthy, stable and predictable labor capital cooperation relationships by actively creating a stable employment system environment, enhancing the human resource development and skill formation capabilities of small and medium-sized enterprises, and enhancing the structural and compliance of talent cultivation for vocational school-enterprise cooperation

Key words: employment stability, skill formation, specific skills, commercialization of labor force, socialist market economy