Break out of mainstream life
Now a new narrative for young people,
Highly educated choose to be a blue-collar worker,
quit my job in a big factory to do coffee,
The post-95s became renovation workers......
The pressure of taking public examinations and going on to higher education is increasing day by day.
In the context of the increasing correlation between white-collar work and the sense of crisis,
Throw away the halo, learn a technology, and make money by manual labor,
Will it be a better option right now?
"Resign from Ali and go a different way"
After graduating from college, Fangfang and Xiaoqing found a decent white-collar job step by step like most people, going in and out of the bustling downtown CBD, and their colleagues talked about big projects with tens of millions of turnover every day, with a decent salary, enough to support the role of a delicate urban woman.
After six years of working in brand operation, Xiaoqing can be completely sure that what he does will always be "form greater than content", "I am very tired from working every day, but I don't know what I have done, and my brain is blank after work".
Fangfang joined Alibaba as a visual designer around 2010, and three years later she began to tire of endless performance reviews, reports and work summaries, "even if you don't do anything at all, you have to write reports to the leadership."
Before entering the workplace, many people's imagination is to be able to do something very fulfilling on a big platform, in fact, the bigger the company, the more ordinary people are needed to play the role of screws, and the good or bad of a project may not have much to do with a person.
Hangzhou Ali Park/Image courtesy of Visual China
As a result, both Xiaoqing and Fangfang began to explore what they were really passionate about, and taught themselves baking in their spare time. After accumulating customers for 4 years, Fangfang successfully owned her own bakery. Xiaoqing has just quit her job and is working as an apprentice at a restaurant.
And some white-collar jobs, for graduates who have just entered the workforce, are not only difficult to make ends meet, but even to the extent of dragging down the body. Sedentary, overtime, and stressful make the "crispy workers" hope for the purity and decompression of manual labor.
Pang Xing, who has been doing interior design for two years since graduation, "going to work at nine o'clock in the morning, working overtime until eleven or twelve o'clock in the evening or even two or three o'clock in the morning is commonplace, and it is thousands of dollars a month to toss", the workers on the construction site he often comes into contact with, but have a regular schedule from eight to five in the morning, and the salary is not lower than his own, so he changed his career to become a plumber through many introductions.
Before the age of 30, she worked in a game company, one day her right eye suddenly could only see a piece of gray, she was so frightened that she fell to the ground and did not dare to move, went to the hospital for examination, high myopia and long-term exposure to the computer, the nerves in the fundus of the eye have been damaged and cannot be recovered, if not properly controlled, it may also develop into glaucoma and even blindness.
After studying abroad for an MBA, she hopes to find a job that has less to do with computers, but office work is almost unavoidable. After her eyes deteriorated again, she decided to go to a vocational school and completely switch to manual labor.
Exchange "cheap labor" for technology
According to the 2022 survey on front-line blue-collar employment and salary management released by CIIC, the annual salary of ordinary blue-collar workers in 2022 will be about 80,000 yuan, and the market high level will be between 9-110,000 yuan, and the annual salary of skilled blue-collar workers will be more than 100,000 yuan, and the market high level will be between 12-150,000 yuan. Some blue-collar workers with high skill requirements even earn as much as 15-200,000 yuan per year.
According to the data of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2022, the per capita monthly income of urban white-collar workers is 5,602.22 yuan, and the median income is 4,000 yuan. Some scholars have also put forward the view that "China's blue-collar gentrification is inevitable".
Judging from the feedback of front-line workers, the market is relatively lacking in skilled jobs, such as heavy physical masons, and the salary for a 15-day construction period is generally 10,000 yuan. Abroad, it is more common for blue-collar workers with vocational skills training to earn higher starting salaries than white-collar workers. In Canada, licensed plumbers and electricians can earn 100-180 Canadian dollars per hour, while white-collar workers earn about 2,000 Canadian dollars per month.
Skilled jobs are becoming more and more popular in the market with increased experience, and compared to the "35-year-old layoff crisis" of office work, many people put on a high-paying, non-internal friction, and promising filter for this job.
In fact, the pain that you will face when you really enter this line of work is different dimensional. Because of the importance of work experience and years, newcomers inevitably go through a difficult period of exchanging "cheap labor" for technology.
The threshold for plumbers to enter the industry is high, and most skilled masters are reluctant to recruit apprentices. After "intercepting" the decoration master in the community and repeatedly hitting a wall, Pang Xing was lucky to meet an enthusiastic cleaning aunt on the short video platform and introduced him to the teacher. As an apprentice, the daily salary is only 150 yuan, and then he has to rely on himself to expand the source of customers and accumulate experience, and after three years, Pang Xing's daily salary finally rose to more than 500 yuan.
The results of Pang Xing's work
But to do manual labor means that you don't work today, or if you don't take on one less project, you won't have an income. The Spring Festival, a festival where people all over the country rest, has become Pang Xing's most anxious time.
The vocational and technical training programs that she applied for in Germany were usually co-organized by schools and companies, and she took classes while doing internships. As a person with zero experience, she wrote letters or called more than a dozen companies to apply, but there was no response, and she spent money on job search training courses, but it still had no effect.
When she found despair, a small company gave her a week's trial and went to the garden to help. However, anyone can do the work of cutting hedges, sweeping leaves, and clearing weeds, but when it comes to exertion, her colleagues can only lift eight or ten bricks at a time, and she can only move two. Because her strength was so small, the boss planned not to pass the trial, but fortunately, she had a good working attitude, so she stayed as an informal helper.
Two months later, he became a trainee, working four days a week, attending classes one day, and receiving a salary of more than 800 euros per month. In addition to the rent of more than 400 euros, he can barely maintain his daily expenses, and he can't go out to play, and he has neither money nor energy. Sometimes her mother will fund a little, and Thingyu feels that it is a bit embarrassing to take her parents' money in her 30s.
The most difficult period was at the vocational school, when she was not very good at German, the teacher spoke fast, and it was difficult to keep up, and most of the classmates were teenagers, there was a generation gap, so she had no friends. Despite her very hard work, she could only read a quarter of an article that the least serious students in the class had read. A year later, the situation has not improved, but has accumulated.
In retrospect, if it weren't for the sunk costs and the encouragement of her family, she might have really given up.
"Being able to exercise is fake, but being injured is real"
In addition to salary, the most testing of manual labor is undoubtedly physical fitness.
There are a total of 24 people in the class of garden construction, and there are only 4 women, and the gap in physical strength naturally exists. The trolleys on the construction site generally load more than 100 catties of sand and gravel at a time, and they often need to shovel down 1.5 tons of materials little by little and transport them to the small garden that the car can't drive, and at most, Qiang Yu and a female colleague transported 3.5 tons a day.
Rain work photo
In the first three months of work, Ting Yu had to fall on the sofa and sleep for an hour after returning home every day before he could get up, so tired that he couldn't hold chopsticks steadily when eating. Except for work, I have no energy to care about everything else, I lose interest in meeting friends and cooking, and my temper deteriorates in front of my family. Later, the body gradually adapted, and it slowly improved.
Zingyu thinks that physical work can exercise the body is fake, although you are working, it is impossible to maintain the correct posture at all times like in the gym, what you have to consider is how to complete the movement quickly with less effort. For example, if you use natural stone to build a wall, the length and width of the stone may be a little larger than A4 paper, more than ten centimeters high, and people need to bend over and carry it constantly, and they will squat on the ground for a long time to work, which will cause great damage to the knees and waist.
The natural stone construction project in which Ting Yu participated
Caicai studied logistics management at a university in China, and was originally going to go abroad for graduate school, but she learned that blue-collar workers abroad are easy to find jobs, so she chose to drop out of her junior year to learn something "what she really likes", and after comprehensive consideration, she applied for a Canadian architectural engineering major. After graduating, in order to get a work permit, she worked in a restaurant, cut meat in a supermarket, and later, a colleague who did landscape gardening suggested that she also try it, and she became a garden engineering worker for four years.
Overcoming cleanliness was her first challenge, "I had to accept that my work environment was a lot of gray and dirty." Outdoor work is usually carried out in spring and summer, and it is the norm to work eleven or twelve hours a day during rush work. Even if Caicai loves outdoor sports very much, continuous exposure and labor in the sun is quite tiring.
The minimum number of bricks used in the project is seven or eight kilograms, and the maximum is more than sixty kilograms, and the average person has to finish laying one ton per day on the day of brick laying. Because the team is small, employees have to participate in every link, and Caicai also learned to drive various excavators, bulldozers, forklifts, and rammers, shuttling through the garden to dig and transport. It's also one of her favorite sessions, though, and she calls it the Big Toy.
Nana's work photo
In the past four years, Caicai has completely turned from white to black, and basically summed up the main gains of this job: countless minor and serious injuries suffered by making holes, moving bricks, and carrying cement every day, plus a sense of accomplishment in researching new tools and completing new projects.
Pang Xing has a foundation in architecture, although the skills of plumbers are not difficult for him, and the degree of dirtiness and fatigue has made him regret it. What's even more difficult is that many skilled workers who rely on themselves to take orders do not have five insurances and one housing fund, and seeing a doctor has become a problem. Once, he was electrocuted on a 3-meter-high wall and almost fell straight down. Some workers fell down the ladder and their hands hurt all the time, because they didn't have social security, so they just took some medicine and rested for a few days.
You can get real-time feedback on technical work, but you can also overturn the plan and start over like a normal workplace. Xiaoqing honed her mentality by failing again and again in the early stage of study, and the garden work done by Ting Yu and Caicai was sometimes tearing down and redoing the built facilities because the customers were not satisfied.
But the form of a sense of accomplishment is completely different, once you build a wall, it will always be there, and making a birthday cake that satisfies others is the successful completion of a project, and they are fascinated by the feeling of seeing and touching.
Xiaoqing's work record
Discrimination and psychological disparities that are difficult to eliminate
Since becoming a plumber, Pang Xing has heard the most words from his family members that "you worked hard for your education, but you went back to work as a coolie".
"No matter how ordinary a white-collar worker is, he is clean and tidy, but the renovation workers on the road in the morning are always dirty. Pang Xing sometimes felt inferior, before changing careers, Xin Yu hesitated, mainly because she didn't want to completely discard the design and management skills she had learned before, and it was the more equal environment abroad and the encouragement of her family that made her take this step.
Until now, she has resisted the maintenance of the garden, such as weeding, hedgerowing, lawn mowing, and flower planting, because they do not require any professional knowledge and make her feel worthy. Compared to activities such as paving and building walls, she can also feel the contempt from local customers when doing these relatively simple tasks, as if foreigners can only do such substitutable things.
In Canada, Caicai has even encountered more explicit discrimination. An old Chinese lady said to her grandson, "In the future, you must study hard, otherwise you can only do this kind of work." Caicai was devastated when she heard this, most of the people in their team had a bachelor's degree or above, "I chose this job just because I liked it."
"I can't do it all my life, but now I'm happy"
Although technical jobs will become more and more popular with the increase of experience, labor that relies on physical labor is still a bowl of "youth rice".
A colleague of Xinyu had physical problems when she was 30 years old, and she also suffered varying degrees of damage to her cervical spine, knees and hips. Xinyi is 40 years old, and it is unrealistic for her to work until she is 50 years old, and now that her hourly wage has risen to about 17 euros, she has reduced her working hours to 30 hours a week, and spends more time focusing on her life and traveling.
She plans to move to a management position with less time on the construction site in the future, but thinking of the burden on her eyes caused by looking at the computer, she decided to take it one step at a time, "I don't have any big ambitions, I just want to make some money and use it, and my old age should not be so bleak."
Caicai is a perfectionist, making up for her physical weakness, because she pays special attention to every detail, and is keen to find relevant materials to study in private, and she has a talent for aesthetics, and within two years she has become the manager of a small team. She plans to slowly reduce her hands-on workload and actually move into management in the future.
After Fangfang decided to make landscape cakes, she gradually established her own baking brand. In the past, she was more immersed in making cakes, but now she is mainly responsible for further education and staff training. Brand operation and sales have become more important, and the workplace used to require constant interaction with people, and it still is.
Fang Hao Hao landscape cake
However, they did get a different life experience by choosing a technology. Pang Xing no longer has to work overtime until two o'clock, and when he doesn't want to do it during the day, he runs out to play for a while or goes back to rest directly. Now, Caicai's salary is better than that of the average bank teller and restaurant manager, and she spends her money on her personal hobbies such as diving and skiing on weekends and winters.
Xiaoqing, who has the least qualifications, laughed and said that the most he gained in a year as an apprentice was injury, either forearm pain or thigh pain, cervical spondylosis, burned his hands twice, and broke his teeth after eating.
But she was extremely excited, she was filled with work every day, had a good appetite for three meals, and her sleep was extremely good, and she successfully gained weight for the first time in her life. After the person who was going to serve the dishes in the past actually resigned, he found that the situation seemed to be starting to get worse.
Angry Yu said: "I have a very good mentality now, because no matter how difficult it is, it is like a foundation, digging little by little, and it can always be dug up." It's just that I couldn't see anything in the first few weeks. ”
Photo courtesy of the interviewee
Interview/Editor: Bela