The labor shortage in China's coastal areas should encourage the nation's first-generation industrial cities to treat workers more decently and offer them more benefits.

The inevitable change is bound to be raised at the annual session of the National People's Congress due to open in Beijing on Friday.

A similar decline in the arrival of migrant workers from interior rural areas was reported after the lunar new year in 2009. But that was during the world's worst financial crisis in 80 years, when there were fewer jobs.