Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (44 page)

WORKERS WANTED

Looking for 30 female workers
and 15 male workers

Qualifications:

• 1. Ages 18 to 35, middle-school education
  
• 2. Good health, good quality
  
• 3. Attentive to hygiene, willing to eat bitterness and work hard
  

Boss Wang needed men to handle the big metal punch presses, which manufacture the rough rings used on the Machine’s assembly line. Mostly, though, he planned to hire women. The majority of the factory’s jobs were unskilled and required little strength: workers had to sort underwire, monitor assembly lines, and package finished bra rings. Like other factory managers, Boss Wang expressed a strong preference for young female workers.

“Girls have more patience and they’re easier to handle,” he explained. “Men are more trouble—they start fights or cause some other problem.” When I asked about the ideal worker, Boss Wang said that she should be young and inexperienced. “If she’s already had other jobs, then I’ll just have to pay her more,” he said. For the same reason he preferred a candidate to have little formal education. It was a bad sign if she dressed well or had a distinctive hairstyle. Pretty girls were a risk. “I want a person to look average,” Boss Wang said. “I don’t want somebody who’s too complicated. I don’t want somebody who thinks, ‘If I feel like doing something, then I’m going to do it.’ That’s no good for me.” One of Boss Wang’s questions in job interviews was to ask about hobbies. If a candidate said “Playing cards” or “Spending time with friends,” that was a negative—too frivolous. “Reading books” indicated that an applicant was lazy. Worst of all was a job candidate who said she spent free time on the Internet. “I like it if she enjoys being with her family, or caring for her mother, or something like that,” Boss Wang said. “That’s what a simple person from the countryside should be like. I want somebody who can eat bitterness.”

IN CHINESE FACTORY TOWNS,
late winter is the season of the job search. Many migrants return home for the Spring Festival holiday, when the Chinese New Year is celebrated, and afterward they board buses and trains bound for cities with development zones. It’s a restless time—a month when people finally act on long-held plans to leave the village, or switch jobs, or try a new city. Even the cautious are spurred to action, and a decision made during this period often shapes the rest of the year. Occasionally, a decade later, a migrant will look back and realize that her entire career was sparked by one chance interview during a February morning long ago.

All of this was new to Lishui. Locals told me that 2006 was the first year the development zone would have a significant number of working factories, and yet somehow the news had already gone out to migrants. They poured out of the local train station, and they clogged
the bus terminus; on the new expressway most traffic consisted of long-distance buses catering to job seekers. In China, where the migrant population grows by an estimated ten million every year, countless bus routes run from the provincial interior. Usually their destination is the coast, but sometimes they find their way to less established places like Lishui. That first year in the development zone, migrants dragged their bags along unfinished roads—people without jobs, newly arrived in a place without proper streets. But they knew some factories were already buzzing, and others would soon follow, and there was an advantage to arriving early.

Some migrants visited the Lishui “talent market,” the local job-search center. The building was located downtown, and it featured a huge digital screen that scrolled an endless list of jobs. Young people stood in packs, necks craned upward, watching careers flash past in the terse jargon of the Chinese job listing:

BREAKING ROCKS.

MALE, GOOD HEALTH, WILLING TO EAT BITTERNESS.

40
YUAN PER DAY AND MEALS INCLUDED.

ORDINARY WORKERS NEEDED, FEMALE.

MIDDLE SCHOOL EDUCATION.

DIGNIFIED APPEARANCE
, 1.55
METERS OR TALLER.

Jobs often listed height requirements, an obsession in Chinese society. This is especially true for women, whose career opportunities are sharply defined by looks:

SUPERMARKET CASHIERS NEEDED.

FEMALE, MIDDLE SCHOOL OR TRADE SCHOOL EDUCATION.

1.58
METERS OR TALLER.

SKIN FAIR AND CLEAR, GOOD APPEARANCE.

Women are also paid less—a detail that was noted openly in listings, along with regional preferences:

MALE WORKERS NEEDED FOR 35 YUAN PER DAY,
FEMALE WORKERS NEEDED FOR 25 YUAN PER DAY.

AVERAGE WORKERS NEEDED.

PEOPLE FROM JIANGXI AND SICHUAN NOT WANTED.

The listings were like telegrams—companies paid by the word, so they kept things brief. They described only the most necessary qualities, condensing human beings to whatever feature seemed most compelling to the boss. Sometimes they omitted the job description entirely, creating an odd sense of mystery. What exactly would people be doing that required only these characteristics?

FEMALE WORKERS NEEDED.

1.58
METERS TALL, GOOD APPEARANCE.

600
TO
800
PER MONTH.

WORKERS NEEDED.

EYESIGHT MUST BE 4.2 OR BETTER.

800 TO 1,200 PER MONTH.

Many factories didn’t bother with the talent market. They simply posted signs on their front gates and assumed that migrants would do the legwork. During that first February in Lishui, people wandered the district in packs, and it felt like an extension of the Spring Festival holiday. Everybody was young; they wore new clothes; their voices rose in excitement as they cruised the factory strip. People from the same region tended to stick together, and often two groups met in the street to exchange information. Down the road from the bra ring factory, I joined a crowd of thirty who had gathered at the front gate of Jinchao Synthetic Leather, one of the biggest plants in the region. A factory guard checked the identification cards of potential applicants, and he turned away anybody whose ID showed a home address in Guizhou Province. Guizhou is the poorest province in China, located deep in the interior, and it’s home to many ethnic minorities.

A group of young Guizhou people had just been rejected, and now they stood in the street, discussing where to go next. I asked one of them what Jinchao Synthetic Leather had against his home province. “They didn’t give a reason,” he said. “But lots of workers from Guizhou come to Lishui, so sometimes the factories won’t accept us.”

It’s illegal for a Chinese company to discriminate on the basis of home province, although in practice this happens all the time. I was curious to hear Jinchao’s reasons, so I followed a line of applicants inside. They made their way to the second floor, where the deputy manager conducted interviews in his office. He didn’t hesitate when I asked about the restriction. “People from Guizhou like to fight,” he said. “They’re too much trouble in the factory. Around here a lot of the petty criminals come from Guizhou, too. So I don’t want them working in the factory.”

I had expected him to finesse the point, or maybe refuse to answer. But he couldn’t have been more direct: he refused to hire people from Guizhou because he didn’t like them. Who needs a better reason than that? He was just as straightforward with the potential workers who crowded around his desk. When one man tried to negotiate for a higher salary by complaining about the chemicals on the pleather assembly line, the manager shot back, “If you don’t want to work with toxic fumes, maybe you should become a teacher.” Another applicant complained that the starting wages for an unskilled worker—3.8 yuan per hour, or 47 cents—were too low. The manager said, “If you were a woman, you’d make even less. Women make only 3.4. So you should be happy with 3.8.” I asked why women were paid less for the same job, which was another dumb question. “Because women aren’t as strong,” the manager said matter-of-factly. “There are some things that a man can do better, so we have to pay them more.”

But I noticed that workers responded to this man, despite the fact that almost everything out of his mouth seemed offensive. He had an easy rapport with the returning employees, who stopped by the desk to register for the coming work year. And bolder applicants tended to be rewarded. One man wouldn’t agree to the starting wage; he had already worked a similar job at another factory, and he believed that his experi
ence was worth a higher salary. The manager flatly refused (“Go back to your old job”), but the worker wouldn’t leave. He stood by the desk, making his case while the manager dealt with other applicants. Periodically they exchanged barbs (“I wouldn’t have come here if I’d known you weren’t fair” “Why would I care if you came here or not?”), but neither one ever showed any anger. After a full hour, the manager finally signed him up at the higher wage. That’s what it took to win his respect—patience and determination and a certain bullheadedness.

Nobody had been doing this for long. Ten years ago, most Chinese employment was government-assigned, and in those days it was rare for a Chinese person to embark on an independent job search. Since then, people have learned quickly, but the routine is still new—the blind recruit the blind. And they have no time for the polish of the American human resources department. There are no euphemisms, no indirections; nobody talks about “becoming part of the team” or “opportunities for growth” or a desire for “highly motivated, creative individuals.” People say exactly what they think, and they make brutally sharp evaluations; they feel free to act on any whim or prejudice. Here in China, “human resources” has a more literal meaning: millions of people need to find work, and countless factories need them to work hard, and no subtleties of language can soften the hard calculus of supply and demand.

In Lishui, the bra ring factory was one of the local companies that was hiring for the first time, and Boss Wang and Boss Gao interviewed applicants in the second-floor office. Like everything else in the factory, the office had been designed in a rush, and the furnishings felt temporary. A dirty carpet had been tossed across the cement floor, and there was a cheap couch, a low tea table, a pair of wooden desks, and two potted plants that already appeared to be dying from neglect. Brilliantly colored bra rings had been scattered atop one of the desks. They were the only spots of brightness in the room, and whenever a job applicant asked about the factory’s product, Boss Wang pushed a few rings across the desk, like a croupier in a casino. “Clothing accessories for underwear,” he would say. And often that explanation was enough, especially for female applicants, who recognized the product instantly. Only men had to be told what the rings were for.

The factory offered a starting wage of three and a half yuan per hour, which was a little more than forty cents. In Lishui, that was the legal minimum. China doesn’t have a nationwide standard—because of wide regional disparities in wealth, each city sets its own minimum wage. In 2006, a more developed place like Guangzhou had a minimum of 4.3 yuan per hour, but that didn’t guarantee that workers earned more money. In advanced cities, low-level jobs might be harder to find, or hours might be fewer. This is a key detail for workers, who care about hours as much as they care about the starting wage. Most people want to work as much as possible—since they’re away from home, there’s no point in having free weekends or holidays. They’re pleased to hear that a factory offers overtime hours, and the perfect job is one in which an employee can expect no vacation days apart from major national holidays, such as the Spring Festival. Sometimes an assembly-line worker told me proudly that she was clocking nearly three hundred hours per month. In that situation, Lishui’s hourly minimum became a monthly wage of one hundred and twenty dollars—excellent money for an uneducated migrant.

In truth, Boss Wang didn’t know how many hours he could offer, or even how many workers he needed, because it would all be determined by the demand for his product. But he told applicants what they wanted to hear: he assured them they’d have at least ten hours of labor every day, and no more than one day’s vacation every month. That was the Lishui version of a boss’s empty promise—he soothingly told applicants he’d work them to the bone, when in fact they might get stuck with only forty hours a week. The smarter applicants asked how long the company had been in the business, and many people inquired about the production process. Often a woman said, “Are there any fumes here?” In Lishui, that’s shorthand for DMF, the solvent used in pleather factories. Word had already spread about the risks, and even uneducated newcomers had a surprisingly accurate understanding. Women who hadn’t yet had children usually avoided working with pleather, because of rumors that the chemicals cause birth defects. And men only worked there if the money was good—pleather factories had to offer more than the minimum wage.

At the bra ring factory, Boss Gao’s father helped with hiring, and
he let me sit in his office while he interviewed workers. Most applicants were teenagers, and they stood with their heads down, mumbling answers. They fiddled nervously with the bra rings—everybody who entered the room invariably fixated on these colorful objects. But occasionally there was an applicant who stood out from the rest. During one interview, Mr. Gao asked a woman for her age, and she said, “Do you mean my real age, or the age that’s on my identity card?”

“What does your identity card say?”

“It says I’m twenty-five, but that’s not right. I had it changed when I first went out to work, because I was too young. That was many years ago. Now I’m really twenty-three.”