Yang Fan sits on a low stool next to a small ziggurat of parcels while two of his colleagues sleep nearby, one on a camp bed and the other on a wooden pallet. The delivery firm they work for is having a promotion so the shops they collect from here on the eighth floor of a shabby mall in Beijing are busier than usual.
“We’ve been getting up at 4am or 5am every day to make sure we can keep up. Now we are on our break, and my colleagues, you can see they’re catching up on sleep,” he says.
“I’m in charge of this floor. There are several floors selling electronics in this building, with a lot of businesses. Each floor has a courier from our company and all the other delivery companies have a courier in charge of each floor too.”
Yang started working for the delivery company three years ago, aged 25, when he moved to Beijing from his home city of Taian in Shandong province. He had just graduated from Shandong Taian University with a degree in economic management and he had imagined a different career path for himself.
“Before I graduated, I definitely wanted to find an office job, because at least it wouldn’t be so hard. But I couldn’t find a suitable job, so I joined the courier staff in the logistics industry,” he says.
“The pay is pretty good, I have social insurance and a housing allowance, and this is a relatively secure job.”
Yang is part of a trend in China that has seen blue-collar jobs surge in popularity among young people, according to a report published in June by the online recruitment platform Zhaopin. During the first quarter of 2024, the number of people under 25 applying for blue-collar jobs rose by 165 per cent compared with the same period in 2019.
This is partly a response to increased demand for workers such as Yang driven by the dramatic growth of ecommerce in China. There are now eight times more jobs in distribution than there were in 2019 before the coronavirus pandemic began.
The number of blue-collar jobs on offer in the first quarter of this year was almost four times greater than five years earlier. The same period has also seen a sharp increase in demand for truck and van drivers, maintenance workers and security guards.
A rebound in manufacturing has driven factory owners to unprecedented measures in their effort to recruit workers. Where workers once queued outside factories in search of work, the labour shortage has flipped that pattern on its head.
Earlier this year, a video that became a sensation on Chinese social media showed the owners of garment factories in the southern city of Guangzhou forming a line about 3km long. They were holding samples of their clothing alongside placards advertising available jobs and salary levels, hoping to attract the interest of potential employees walking past.
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The expansion in blue-collar work comes as youth unemployment in China remains high, with almost 15 per cent of those aged 16-24 without a job in April. Graduates who once hoped for well-paid jobs in the private sector are seeking a safe haven by working for the government, leading to a sharp rise in numbers sitting the civil service examination.
A record 11.79 million college students will graduate in China this year amid a prolonged slump in the property market that was long a big driver of economic growth. Beijing is promoting the development of high-tech sectors including green energy, electric vehicles and medical technology but weak consumer confidence and a collapse in foreign direct investment have affected the job market.
White-collar workers saw their end-of-year bonuses cut or cancelled last year as wages stagnated and job opportunities shrank. This has seen office workers cling to their jobs rather than risk moving, limiting promotion prospects for those below them.
Wages for blue-collar workers have risen almost 36 per cent since 2019, according to Zhaopin, outpacing overall pay growth by nearly 8 per cent. For Yang, the opportunity to earn more makes his job more attractive than the office work his college degree qualified him for.
“The good thing about our job is that you can make more money as long as you work hard, and if you work hard, you can see it reflected in your income,” he says.
“I don’t mind being a courier worker or the fact that I’m doing a blue-collar job. In fact, I’m quite proud of it. I work for a living. I don’t feel inferior in any way.”
Yang has no interest in being promoted within the company because he has seen the stress that management roles have caused colleagues. And he enjoys the easy atmosphere among his workmates on the floor.
“All my colleagues are men. Sometimes we chat and joke together, and we have no inhibitions,” he says. “No matter what anyone says, everyone can accept and understand it and the more time we spend together, the more we get to know each other.”
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Amy Li, who is 25, has been working at a hair salon near Wangfujing, one of Beijing’s main shopping streets, for the past two years. Her work mostly involves helping with perms, hair colouring and keeping the salon clean.
Li studied accounting at a business college in Henan province, about 700km southwest of Beijing, and hoped to find a job in that field after graduation. But accounting jobs were scarce after the pandemic, and she could not find anything suitable in her hometown.
“Like most girls, I liked to dress up and style my hair. I got along well with the hairstylists in my hometown, they were my friends. Suddenly one day I thought it would be a good way to develop a new career path for myself,” she says.
“When I first started working, I wasn’t used to it because I had never been exposed to this kind of work before. It was completely different from what I imagined, and it took a while for me to fit in. But the atmosphere in the shop is very good, and my colleagues have been very helpful.”
Li says that she would have had to start at the bottom in accountancy and take a series of exams to move up but the hair salon offers a faster route upwards through training and she is now learning to cut hair. If a good accounting job came up in her hometown, she would consider taking it but her focus remains on the hair and beauty sector.
“At the beginning, I was very concerned because I worked hard to go to college and got a bachelor’s degree. Suddenly I was giving up everything I had previously achieved so I was struggling inside. But when I came to Beijing and came to this hair salon, I was impressed by the environment here,” she says.
“I’m currently in the rising stage of my career here and it would be a pity to give up halfway through my training. But if I become a hairstylist I could open my own salon and use my accounting knowledge so in a way I wouldn’t have abandoned my original profession.”
Li’s colleagues are mostly young and she says the atmosphere is more relaxed than in an accountancy firm where “it could be very boring”. She enjoys chatting to the customers and hearing about what is happening in their lives.
“I used to be an introvert but after I started this job I became more confident about communicating with other people. I used to live in my own little world and I felt depressed before, but now I am more relaxed. I can feel the change in myself,” she says.
“My parents’ attitudes are also changing. At first, they couldn’t accept that I was working in the hairdressing industry. After all, they spent a lot of energy and money on my education. And in my hometown, the beauty and hairdressing industry is not very respectable. But slowly, my parents saw a change in me. Compared with the children of their friends, I have a stable income and I’m completely independent. They’re proud of me now.”
In a branch of McDonald’s on a tree-lined, suburban street in the north of Beijing, Jin Jin (25) was close to the end of her eight-hour shift as a barista. She works six days a week, starting at 6am every day but she can choose when she wants to work.
“This is very important to me. I need freedom time-wise,” she says. “I like to work in the morning so that I can get my own things done in the afternoon.”
Jin studied business administration at Beijing Union University but when she graduated three years ago, in the middle of the pandemic, she struggled to find a job. McDonald’s was recruiting on social media platforms and, after initially resisting the idea, she was drawn to work there by the flexible terms on offer.
“Although the work can be hard and tiring, the more you work the more you earn,” she says.
I make money and I have time to do things I like. I don’t care what other people think
— Li, a McDonald's worker
“The advantage of working at McDonald’s is that the colleagues around me are younger and more diverse. Everyone gets on well. If I had gone to work in an office, I would have to look at a computer or the boss every day.”
Jin lives nearby with her parents and she sees no prospect of being able to buy a place of her own but she is hoping to become the manager of the restaurant within a couple of years. Her parents expected her to give up the job in McDonald’s within a few days because it was so tiring.
“I persevered and survived and my parents support my choice. I have a bachelor’s degree and of course my parents want me to have a job with a good future. Right now, I think I have development opportunities in McDonald’s,” she says.
Working in the restaurant has its downside and Li says the customers can be “very evil” and demanding, filing complaints about the slightest deficiency. But she would not exchange it for an office job and like many in her generation, she is less concerned than older Chinese people about what people think of her.
“I make money and I have time to do things I like,” she says. “I don’t care what other people think. We’re all just making a living.”
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