Unequal Occupational Mobilities Between Rural Migrant and Urban Resident Workers in Urban China

The current scholarship on inequality of occupational attainment between rural migrant workers (RMW) and urban resident workers (URW) is largely dominated by evidence suggesting a landscape of occupational segregation, whilst there is a lack of studies researching the equality of occupational mobility. To fill this gap, this study compares the occupational mobilities between RMW and URW in China's urban labor market. Three heatmaps are used to visualize the differences between these two groups in the outflow distributions of occupational mobility. The results show a marked disadvantage of RMW's mobility into white-collar occupations and a relatively high tendency for them to move to or to stay in the manual and agricultural occupations.