Wang Defu
(School of Sociology, Wuhan University)
The community is the foundation of the grassroots, and community workers are the backbone of community governance. By the end of 2020, there were 4.338 million community workers nationwide. In recent years, with the increasing importance of community governance, the position of community worker has also gained more and more social recognition, and the attraction of highly educated young employment groups has been continuously improved, and the popularity of applying for the examination has increased year by year. In April this year, the "Opinions of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council on Strengthening the Construction of the Community Worker Team" was released, as the first special central document, pointing out the direction for strengthening the construction of the community worker team in the new era. We need to innovate and improve the career development and career incentive mechanism, so that community workers who want to do things, can do things, and get things done have opportunities and stages, so that the profession of community workers can be more attractive, more promising, and more attractive.
The author's years of community research have found that community workers are generally actively performing their duties, fulfilling increasingly onerous administrative tasks with due diligence, wholeheartedly serving the people, and showing a strong sense of professional identity and achievement. However, it must be admitted that there are still some problems that need to be improved urgently in the current situation of the profession of community workers, which are more prominent in the following four aspects:
First, there is the issue of economic treatment. In recent years, the income of community workers has been increased everywhere. Objectively, the economic treatment is constantly improving, but there are still problems of "relative deprivation" and "imbalance of rewards for pay". The sense of relative deprivation comes from the comparison with other groups in the system under the premise of similar workload, and the imbalance of effort and return comes from the mismatch between economic income and work input, especially if the central work requires long-term overtime, and the imbalance will be exacerbated.
Second, the issue of development prospects. In general, the career development of community workers in the community is smooth, and their main dissatisfaction with the career development prospects comes from the establishment barriers. Community workers are hired by the government, and there are hard-to-break barriers between community workers and civil servants and career workers. There have been some places that have explored the policy of giving outstanding community workers career editors or public examination editors, but the proportion is small and the threshold is high.
Burnout issues. Burnout among community workers manifests itself as slacking off at work, powerlessness, and a low sense of achievement. Many community workers are unable to withdraw from paperwork and are tired of coping with it, so that they have formed a kind of work "habit", that is, they are content to sit in the office and do copywriting work, avoid doing mass work, and dare not face all kinds of contradictions and challenges in residents' affairs, but instead excuse themselves from "being entangled in administrative affairs". These jobs struggle to generate a sense of value and meaning, exacerbating career boredom among community workers and increasing their resentment over treatment and development issues.
The result of the above problems is occupational instability. This is mainly manifested in young community workers, some of whom prepare for a job change from the beginning of their employment, mainly by taking the civil service or career preparation exams. The government has been encouraging fresh college students to work in grassroots communities and enjoy the preferential care policy for civil service examinations. According to the law of career development, community workers start from being in charge of a certain public service work, and after several years of post experience, they can be candidates for party committees or neighborhood committees and enter the two committees through elections. Occupational instability will interrupt the rhythm of cadre training, and will also affect the work of their positions.
What do you think of this current situation of occupational instability? In the author's opinion, it is not appropriate to simply "problematize" it. At least for now, this instability is essentially more of a normal career screening. The career selection mechanism of community work is generated by the characteristics of its occupation. Community work has both administrative and social attributes, which is determined by the community's position at the junction between the state and society. Administrative, that is, the administrative tasks and public service functions of the country, the professionalism required can be called administrative literacy, which requires strong learning ability, the ability to timely grasp the knowledge of policies and regulations that are constantly adjusted and increasingly refined and professional, and the common office skills that adapt to the increasingly modern, standardized and technical, but also to be able to plan and organize projects and activities. Sociality refers to the ability to deal with all kinds of people in the grassroots society, which is commonly referred to as the ability to work with the masses. The ability of the masses to complete residents' affairs and state tasks is the basic ability of grassroots or front-line work. The professionalism of the two aspects is not static, but can be gradually cultivated and improved in work practice. From the perspective of initial literacy, administrative literacy can be mastered through school education and special training, but it is difficult to obtain mass work literacy through this channel, and it is more dependent on the practical experience of individual social life. The acquired improvement of professional quality also requires active and active participation in work practice, exercise and accumulate experience in practice.
The advantage of young people's professional literacy is that they have strong administrative literacy and weak social literacy. In the work of the community center, everyone should break the daily division of labor and participate in the work of the masses, and the strength and weakness of social literacy will be fully revealed. In a community work setting, central work is more likely to create workplace stress than regular work, which is detrimental to young community workers who are new to employment. In the absence of sufficient opportunities to participate and motivation to participate, the improvement of social literacy will fall into a bottleneck, and the comprehensive professional quality will be locked at a certain level of "involution", that is, no matter how much workload there is, it is only a simple mechanical repetitive work, which is difficult to produce positive incentives for it, but will amplify its sensitivity to direct issues such as treatment and pressure, so as to be pushed away by the "push".
The screening effect of professionalism will make those who are not suitable or do not like mass work choose to leave. The social literacy required for mass work is closely related to social hobbies and social skills. The professionalism of community work requires a high level of social willingness and ability, and it is normal for some people to choose to quit voluntarily after learning this. In addition, in a sense, the issue of low remuneration also objectively plays a screening role, so that those who value more economic benefits and career prospects leave the community worker ranks, and those who remain are relatively acceptable and tolerant, and therefore inherently more enthusiastic and loyal to the profession of community workers.
Therefore, although there will inevitably be "accidental injuries" in career screening, the overall team of community workers is "local mobility and overall stability". In some places, there is even fierce competition for the position of community worker, and the attractiveness of the profession is not low, which also shows that the existing problems cannot be simplified.
