Graduated from university and went ashore to clean

At the moment when the pressure of going ashore is everywhere, some highly educated young people have decided to take a break from their current life and dive into jobs with low educational requirements such as the cleaning industry to engage in manual labor after being blocked from finding a job or going to graduate school, so as to avoid the problems in front of them.

After diving, they found that what awaited them was another set of survival logic that was also not simple, waiting for them to deal with it.

After graduating from college, I went to work as a cleaner

The tile floor is covered with green mold spots, and the corners of the walls are covered with orange slippery plaque. The urine stains in the squatting toilet were deep, and the black water deposited at the non-slip brick emitted a rancid smell, and Zhou Qing only felt a surge in his stomach. Zhou Qing held back his vomiting and poured the detergent into the squatting toilet, and set out to clean the bathroom.

After a few minutes, it was estimated that the detergent had softened some of the dirt, Zhou Qing held his breath and half-squatted to scrub the squatting toilet vigorously. From time to time, she adjusts the angle of the brush, trying not to miss every inch of dirt as far as her eye can see.

Zhou Qing, 27, graduated from the business administration department of a university in Zhejiang Province, and like many of her classmates, she entered the workforce as a white-collar worker. In the first few years, she worked as an administrative clerk in a pharmaceutical company in Shenzhen, responsible for writing copywriting for corporate culture promotion, and received a salary of more than 7,000 yuan per month. In the last year, she has become a janitor. With her mind and patience, she now has a stable source of customers, with no rest every month, and an income of 15,000 yuan.

Before the order set off, the employer told Zhou Qing that there were not many things at home. But as soon as he entered the door, Zhou Qing found that this was not the case at all. Twenty or thirty pairs of shoes were piled up at the door, staggering from side to side. On the couch, the bedding and clothes were clumped together, and the zipper of the cloth wardrobe in the room was open, spitting out the pillows, hangers and shoeboxes inside. What's even more terrifying is that the ground is full of domestic garbage, and at first, there is no place to put your feet.

Figure | The situation at the customer's home when the week clears the house

As a cleaner, many times he has to face the situation that his employer's house needs to be cleaned urgently, but Zhou Qing rarely encounters this kind of "exceeding" situation, and at that moment he also had the idea of escaping. In the bedroom, the smell of sweat and musty mixed and diffused, and the Coke bottle poured on the floor and dripped, soaking a delivery carton. Empty bottles, broken hair, dust particles, cockroach carcasses and egg sheaths decorate the empty floor. The movement of the visitor alarmed a group of small cockroaches, and they rushed quickly, a few burrowed into the gaps, and a few crawled on Zhou Qing's legs.

Zhou Qing couldn't hold back his screams, didn't hold back his swearing, and then started this cleaning service.

At the end of the cleaning order, Zhou Qing removed 9 half-person-high bags of garbage from the customer's home. They are temporarily piled up in a corner of the customer's living room, taking up a large area. The clock starts at 1:30 p.m. and the cleaning ends at 11:30 p.m., for a total of 10 hours. After cleaning up the indoor garbage, it was early in the morning when Zhou Qing returned to the rented residence from his employer's house. Zhou Qing thought that he had to wash himself from head to toe to avoid being infected with bacteria, and wiped his face, only to find that his face was stained with a layer of ash. Presumably, the ashes also fell into her eyes, and her eyes burned for most of the day.

Figure | Zhou Qing finished cleaning and took the subway home

Zhou Qing cherishes his current work. Before becoming a cleaner, she hadn't worked for a year. The current days are at least a lot more practical, and the future is also promising, and she doesn't want to go back to the previous days of internal friction in confusion and self-doubt.

This situation was not expected when she resigned. In 2022, Zhou Qing resigned from his previous company. At that time, she felt that the leaders were dissatisfied with her because they thought she was not good at copywriting, and often suppressed her verbally. During that time, she woke up every morning and thought about going back to work, which made her miserable. Physically and mentally exhausted, she resigned naked. At that time, Zhou Qing wanted to escape from the current situation and did not consider whether it would be easy to find a job again.

After getting out of the previous position, Zhou Qing suddenly found that it was no longer easy to find a job. She submitted a number of resumes online, but there was no response, and in the end, as long as the position was in Shenzhen and the conditions seemed to be barely acceptable, she voted: "I'll go wherever you want me." Even so, a year later, she still hasn't found a new job, and her few written exams and interviews have ended without a hitch. As a result, she had to look "downward", leaving the pool of white-collar recruitment and looking for some manual labor job opportunities.

A few years ago, Zhou Qing accidentally got the position of a cleaner, and she remembered that the monthly salary offered at that time was 8,000 to 10,000 yuan, and she was impressed, because she didn't expect that "the salary for doing manual work can be so high". With the mentality of giving it a try, she also went to the interview. The interview results disappointed her, the actual salary was not so high, so she didn't pay attention to it anymore.

When she was worried about not being able to find a job, Zhou Qing swiped the news on social media that someone was doing cleaning, and when there were many orders, she could earn more than 1,000 yuan a day. Considering that she was also a little afraid of mental work after the previous job, she thought that cleaning jobs did not seem to require brains and that the income was considerable, so after thinking about it for a while, she decided to give it a try.

In April 2023, she started using social media to expand her customer base and become a cleaner.

Even if the situation in the homes of some employers is beyond imagination, Zhou Qing does not feel that this situation is excessive. In her opinion, dealing with messy hygiene is what cleaners should do. She straightens out the relationship between inside and outside her duties.

The most uncomfortable thing is that she found that when she joined this industry, she had to face some moments when the profession was not respected.

After coming out of the customer's house after a service, Zhou Qing asked the security guard in the community where the trash can was. The security guard learned that she was the cleaner who came to the door, and called her "you are a cleaner", which she regarded as humiliation and quarreled with the other party. In the process of throwing garbage, the other party followed reluctantly, and after leaving the community, Zhou Qing shed tears. Afterwards, the customer found Zhou Qing and praised her for her meticulous work, hoping to renew the contract. Zhou Qing thanked the other party for their trust, but because of the existence of the security guard, she said that she didn't want to go again in the future.

On the Internet, Zhou Qing posted a video of himself doing cleaning, and sometimes, he was criticized. When there was a conflict, someone taught her that "you can't have a temper in the service industry" and "you don't look at it, you are the lowest level of society", Zhou Qing said, which made her tremble with anger.

Downward-flowing youth

Like Zhou Qing, there are not many young people who have a college education background and have entered the industry from white-collar workers or college students, but they are by no means an exception. During the career window period, under the difficulty of finding a job for white-collar jobs, some young people like Zhou Qing are looking for a way out of manual labor.

Jiang Yicheng, 25, graduated from a university in Zhejiang Province with a major in information and computing science. Before graduating, she had two imaginaries of the future, either with a monthly salary of more than 10,000 yuan, or going to graduate school to continue her studies. As a result, after graduation, Jiang Yicheng failed to be admitted to graduate school for two consecutive years, and Jiang Yicheng went home to be a "squat" for half a year, and came up with the idea of applying for a working holiday visa abroad. In order to raise the necessary funds for the preparation phase, she began to work to save money.

At first, she went to Guangzhou to find a job in merchandising operations, but during the probationary period, she was fired because of "incompetence" and moved out of the dormitory provided by the company within three days.

Figure | Before becoming a cleaner, Jiang Yicheng worked in merchandising in a retail company

Jiang Yicheng felt that it was too embarrassing to go back home after just over a month, so he hid the news of unemployment from his family and continued to look for a job in Guangzhou. When she first came to Guangzhou, she tried to interview for cleaning because she was afraid that she would not find a suitable job.

During the interview, unlike others, she knew that her strength was not in the experience of cleaning or others, so she was alertly aware of the needs of the employer, and tried to show her adaptability to the position in the interview, showing a high degree of obedience, easy management, and a love for cleaning.

Why did she choose the job of a cleaner after graduating from a bachelor's degree - personnel can't help but be curious about her academic qualifications. Jiang Yicheng replied that there is no distinction between high and low occupations, and she wants to run cleaning work as a career.

With the help of interview skills, Jiang Yicheng successfully entered the next round of leadership interviews, and at that time, she began to tell the leaders that her future career plan was to be promoted to the management training post of cleaning. In this way, after two rounds of interviews, she got a job offer from the cleaning company on the spot.

At the beginning, she rejected the offer of the cleaning company because she found a job, and now that she was persuaded to quit during the probationary period, Jiang Yicheng contacted the cleaning company's personnel. The other party told her that she could join the company at any time and provide accommodation. So, Jiang Yicheng moved to a new dormitory and became a cleaner from a merchandising operator.

Before becoming a cleaner, Li Jingyi was an interior designer. Li Jingyi likes design, has never slacked off in college, and is an excellent student in the eyes of teachers. When she was in school, she always wanted to be a good designer. After work, she often stayed up late to catch up on the drawings, sometimes at 12 o'clock in the middle of the night, sometimes all night. For this profession, which is regarded as a lifelong career, she is strict with herself and was anxious about hair loss for a while.

After graduating, she entered the design industry as she wished, and was exposed to the crudeness of the reality behind her ideal career. The first company she worked for after graduation, because of problems on the construction site, several bosses fought each other, Li Jingyi felt that the company was negligent in management and had no prospects, so she resigned and left. Three months after leaving, that company went out of business.

From 2017 to 2019, Li Jingyi's second company was short of funds, and the design fee for the drawings designed by Li Jingyi and the team was 30,000 yuan, and the boss only gave 3,000 yuan. After that, she joined a large-scale local decoration company in Chengdu. The company's management is strict, and employees who are ten minutes late will be deducted one day's wages. During the epidemic, she resigned again because she was dissatisfied with the company's violation of regulations to force employees to be on duty and distribute substandard masks. Later, she saw on the news that the company had a debt of 100 million, and the building was empty overnight.

Later, she followed the university teacher to do a one-year project, went to the construction site to move bricks to accumulate experience, and then joined a real estate company, but caught up with the recession of the real estate industry, in January of the following year, the company tightened its belt and laid off a large number of employees, Li Jingyi was the first person on the layoff list. In March 2022, Li Jingyi joined the fifth company, and was dismissed in July of the same year for offending the leader.

Within a few years, the three companies she joined collapsed, she was laid off twice, and her deposits were negative, and Li Jingyi couldn't help but wonder if she was really not suitable to be a designer. The beautiful imagination of the profession was exhausted, and Li Jingyi left discouraged. She wants to try other jobs, as long as she has a stable income and doesn't hurt her body.

started cleaning because Li Jingyi felt that cleaning did not need a threshold, and she could also exercise. During the change of seasons, she often helped her friends with wardrobe tidying for free, so after learning about the market, she began to look for a job as a cleaner.

She quickly took a fancy to a large public company. The basic salary of the cleaner of this cleaning company is 2,800 yuan, which is higher than the average salary of Li Jingyi when she was a designer. No one around her understands why she goes to do cleaning, but Li Jingyi is very satisfied and feels that there is no better job than this.

There is no distinction between high and low in different professions. However, in real life, all walks of life will still be divided into different fields according to the characteristics of income, substitutability, occupational disease risk and so on.

Zhou Qing only told a friend about changing careers to do cleaning in Shenzhen. Many of her old classmates work in their hometowns, mostly as accountants, working 7 to 5. In the past, Zhou Qing also lived a similar life. When going in and out of the office building, the company's work system is 9 to 7, with occasional overtime.

After becoming a cleaner, Zhou Qing's working time increased intuitively, often using up most of the day and taking up half of the night. Every morning, she gets up at 6 a.m., has breakfast, and arrives at her first employer's home at 8 a.m. or 9 a.m. It is often early in the morning when I get home from work, and the cycle repeats, rarely on weekends.

Lunch comes and goes. She used to finish the first order of the day for lunch, sometimes at two o'clock in the afternoon, and sometimes at four or five o'clock in the evening after the first order. If she rushes to the next employer's house at the appointed time, she can only skip lunch and wait until the end of the night to eat.

After a few months as a cleaner, she found that the well-fitting jeans were more relaxed, her arms were much more toned, and green tendons appeared after a little effort. After a long period of exposure to water and detergents, the skin on the hand faded and faded, and it was repeated several times, and the knuckles became thicker and thicker in the process, and the previous ring was now no longer worn.

Figure | On the first day of resumption of work during the Spring Festival, Zhou Qing's hands were cleaned after cleaning

Compared with before, she still feels that the current work is more relaxed. In the past, I was a white-collar worker, fixed office, and I couldn't choose a leader, and I could only endure the embarrassment of my superiors and colleagues. Now, she thinks that most of the customers she meets are friendly, and when she encounters the occasional difficult customer, she can choose not to make their orders and get out in time. She enlightened herself: No matter how bad things are, they are all passers-by.

After the dive

After really diving, many highly educated young people found that many problems could not be solved by converting circles. New circles, new problems.

After actually doing cleaning, Li Jingyi realized that cleaning work is not a good income if you are willing to do it.

At one time, Li Jingyi found that her company was recruiting a large number of workers, which happened to be the period when the country was implementing a stable and expanding employment policy, and she judged that the company was using this in exchange for the government's job expansion subsidies, and she also got the opportunity to enter the company under this wave. After the peak season at the end of the year, the number of orders decreased, and the distribution subsidy was received, so the company wanted to reduce the team of 50 people to 10 people. Because of the compensation required for layoffs, companies began to try to force employees to leave voluntarily.

In May 2023, Li Jingyi learned that the company asked employees to go to Guangzhou for two months in the name of training, and 10 people voluntarily resigned. Li Jingyi felt that the work was not easy to come by, so she decided to persevere, and many people also obeyed the company's arrangement with such an idea.

After arriving in Guangzhou from Chengdu, the team of 40 people was taken to the construction site to clean a seven-story building converted from an old house, along with teams from Guangzhou, Wuhan and Hangzhou. Several rooms in the building are used as temporary dormitories for employees, with a few beds, an air conditioner and a set of tin cabinets. The pungent smell of formaldehyde was released from the bed board and wall, and Li Jingyi coughed breathlessly.

Teams from different locations are responsible for different regions, and the team that ranks first in the work is judged every day. Li Jingyi's Chengdu team is particularly serious about their work, and they feel that if they perform well, they may be able to get a salary increase when they go back. Twenty years ago, the rusty iron railing, every screw has been polished. The cement blocks, paint spots, and glass glue on the ground are all cleaned. Despite the hard work, Li Jingyi never complained, "I have also learned some experience, I didn't know how to polish before." Her Chengdu team often won the "first place in work" in half a month.

Figure | In the building in Guangzhou, Li Jingyi and her team do waste cleaning

Two weeks later, Li Jingyi heard a ridiculous thing - the team from Guangzhou threatened to find someone to beat the Chengdu team, because she felt crushed and couldn't get over her face. Li Jingyi had never seen such a barbaric scene, and her colleagues were very scared, so they bought tickets overnight and returned to Chengdu. As a result, the company asked the group to go back to Guangzhou to work, but Li Jingyi and her colleagues did not comply, and the company took this opportunity to dismiss all the employees who returned to Chengdu.

When she left the dormitory, Li Jingyi packed her luggage one by one, thinking that she was unemployed again. She moved to a friend's house, went to a roadside stall with her friend in the middle of the night to eat hot pot, and scolded. After this time, she didn't want to join the cleaning company.

At one point, she also wanted to try her hand at the housekeeping industry.

In July 2023, Li Jingyi saw that the government launched free training for organizers, and she signed up to learn another trade. After the training, she wanted to work on her own, and at the same time take on the orders for ordinary cleaning and sorting and storage. In Chengdu, if a single cleaner has a stable source of customers, he will also have an income of seven or eight thousand per month.

However, in the end, she did not survive in this soil. Li Jingyi couldn't figure out her way to expand her guests, and she didn't receive a single order for more than half a year, and her savings were exhausted.

After diving into the housekeeping industry for more than a year, Li Jingyi is now planning to be a designer again, although she has to stay up late to lose her hair and may lose her job at any time, but at least this is a track she is familiar with. This time, Li Jingyi wanted to try to do home decoration and tooling design at the same time. In her conception, the tooling industry has a higher threshold, and the industry competition ecology is relatively healthy, and the situation may be better.

This time, I don't know how long she can hold out.

Doing cleaning is only a short stop in Jiang Yicheng's plan. In April 2023, she saved enough funds, resigned from the cleaning company, and began to prepare to go abroad.

Working in a cleaning company, Jiang Yicheng feels that it is a kind of training for himself. The first thing you need to adapt to is time. Unlike being a white-collar worker, this job completely takes up all her time. Work starts at 8 a.m. every morning and finishes at 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

After returning to the company every day, I have to participate in 3 conferences, and the review will summarize the experience, and the leaders will review the things that the daily list is not doing well and need to be improved, ranging from half an hour to one hour. Then participate in the planning meeting, and the customer service will introduce the situation of the customer's home the next day, and ask the customer's special requirements to spend 1 hour. Finally, there is the division of labor, and the group leader assigns the division of labor for the next day. After the meeting, everyone scattered, sorted out the tools to be used for the next day, and often fell asleep after washing and washing. Weekly single days off, you may also be called back to work overtime at any time.

The short experience of cleaners also made Jiang Yicheng find that the asymmetry of power in the industry makes it difficult for cleaners to fight for reasonable rights and interests.

In her observation, the basic salary of newly recruited cleaners is more than 2,000. According to the regulations, the hourly salary of the cleaner is 18 yuan, but the working hours are negotiated with the customer service in advance before the customer places an order, and will not change. When cleaners enter the home, they often find that the situation at the customer's home is more complicated, and the previously given hours are always not enough, and additional work is required to complete the task, but the excess working hours will not be counted as working hours. Therefore, the working hours counted by the cleaners are often lower than the actual working hours. The extra working hours are free of charge.

The year before the year was the peak season for cleaning, and the customer service would intentionally or unintentionally use the method of reducing the unit price by pressing the time to attract customers. "Cleaners work 11 or 12 hours a day and only get 6 or 7 hours, which was very common a year ago. Jiang Yicheng said.

This is well known to colleagues, customer service and leaders who are also cleaners. The behavior of the customer service is connived, the company management can reap a larger order volume and profits, and the cleaner becomes the only victim in this mutual concession transaction.

As a college student, Jiang Yicheng once consciously rejected this kind of list with large volume and few working hours. But as a result, the list allocated to her was drastically reduced, affecting her income. "It's like a test of obedience, if you don't obey it, you don't have anything to do, you can only get a basic salary. Jiang Yicheng was frustrated to find that even if she was aware of this systematic oppression, it was difficult for her to effectively resist it with her own strength.

In February 2023, the number of orders dropped sharply after the Chinese New Year, and the company began to adjust its personnel structure in order to cope with the redundancy of a large number of cleaners recruited in the peak season at the end of the year. Jiang Yicheng was assigned to another post station to work with new colleagues and new leaders. The former colleagues were the same batch of recruits and trained together, and we knew each other and had a good relationship. In the new station, Jiang Yicheng didn't know anyone, and under the situation of more monks and less meat, everyone guessed each other, intrigued, and the working atmosphere made Jiang Yicheng feel suffocated.

With more than 10,000 yuan saved in his account, Jiang Yicheng decided to resign and prepare for IELTS and apply for a working holiday visa abroad. In August 2023, because of the large number of applicants, Jiang Yicheng did not grab a visa, and she was depressed for a while. Then, she decided to start applying to study abroad for graduate school in computer science. Now, she is living at a friend's house and working part-time as an IELTS teaching assistant while preparing materials for applying to schools.

* At the request of the narrator, the information about the characters in the text is vague

- END -

Written by Guo Jiaqi

Editor|Wen Lihong