"The reference salary is 4800-7500, including food and accommodation", "15-22 yuan for 1 hour, sufficient supply, punctual delivery, no off-season".
When the atmosphere of the Spring Festival in 2023 gradually fades, Baihao Square in Houjie Town, Dongguan City, Guangdong Province is lively.
Now follow the blue-collar club into this lively scene.
These days, many human resources directors and labor agencies in factories have put up signs to recruit workers, and at most there are nearly 10 signs.
The factories here are mainly hardware and leather goods, especially electronic factories, which corresponds to Dongguan's status as a "world factory" in the field of electronics.
The Humen high-speed railway station, which is only 1 km away, has been densely packed out of the station recently, and the surrounding traffic jam has reappeared. Probably because of the end of the Spring Festival, the industrial workers of the "world factory" returned to work in a concentrated manner.
Therefore, around the end of the Spring Festival and the New Year every year, it has become the peak season for recruitment in Dongguan.
Economists have repeatedly emphasized the role of "Made in China" in China's economic development. But can job seekers in "Made in China" find a job they are satisfied with this spring?
"Entering the factory is just a transition".
Lao Liu (pseudonym), who is nearly 60 years old, is a job seeker in Baihao Plaza. He stayed in front of a leather factory signboard for a long time, and from time to time he talked to the person in charge of the site.
Lao Liu has been through a hundred battles, has entered hundreds of factories, and has also pooled money to open a factory, but in the end he did not operate well, so he had to continue to work.
Lao Liu has been working for 32 years, including more than 20 years in Dongguan. With 20 years of experience in the leather handbag manufacturing industry, he can be regarded as an experienced technician in this field.
Because of this, his current salary is relatively high, and he has nearly 7,000 yuan a month.
In fact, Lao Liu had already found his first job after the Spring Festival the day before, which was a factory in the Qiaotou community, which also did leather goods processing.
Lao Liu said that to do leather processing, to be meticulous, do fast, he is a skilled hand, so the salary in the factory is higher.
However, Lao Liu was dissatisfied with the products and management of the factory on the first day, and he had the idea of quitting, which was also the reason why he passed by Baihao Square to look for a new job again.
The factory is not very bad, but it does not pay attention to management, and the quality of the products is not high. When I made leather goods according to my previous experience, the boss did not let me do it, and omitted it, which later affected the quality. Lao Liu said.
For a skilled worker like Lao Liu, it is more not the factory that picks himself, but the factory himself. Lao Liu said that whether he can stay in a factory for a long time is most important to see the management level of the factory.
The quality of managers and employees, punctual work, production first, and quality assurance are all very important. Bosses need to know the frontline workers and what they are thinking, so that they can retain employees. Lao Liu said that among the hundreds of factories he has entered, only 3 have met his expectations in terms of management.
For such a small factory, if you want to have good management, it is easier said than done. Nearly 20 years ago, Lao Liu invested 120,000 yuan to open a factory for the production of handbags. According to his own account, in the end it was mismanaged and overturned. "At that time, I suffered more than 20 injuries and almost died, so I closed the factory later. ”
Later, Lao Liu went to work in various enterprises, and slowly figured out the way of management. He said that if he were to be his own boss now, he would earn a little less, give more benefits to workers, and try to keep people as much as possible.
Now, Lao Liu still has the idea of starting a second business, but this time he does not want to engage in the leather handbag industry he is familiar with, but wants to use his advantages as a skilled worker to work for another two years, save money to retire, and open a self-employed chili sauce business.
Lao Liu is a native of Chongqing, and his family has an ancestral chili sauce recipe. According to him, the home-made chili sauce is better than anything he has ever eaten on the market. Two years later, Lao Liu planned to use the money he had saved over the years to register as a self-employed entrepreneur, and then go to the factory canteen where he used to work to solicit business.
Many farmers over the age of 60 are still farming and raising pigs, and chili sauce is a small business, and it will not be a loss. Lao Liu is full of confidence in the field he will engage in in the future.
For Lao Liu, entering the factory now is just a transition before retirement. For Xiao Jiang (pseudonym), who is in his 20s, entering the factory is also a transition.
Because he couldn't find a suitable job, Xiao Jiang entered an electronics factory in Humen to "move bricks". She made it clear that the assembly line was too boring for a few days to survive, and she quit when she had a suitable job.
Only two people were recruited after the Spring Festival
In the Baihao community, there are only two types of areas: industrial factories and residential areas. Most of the houses are self-built houses by villagers, and there are only a few commercial housing communities. The life service industry is dominated by small shops, and large businesses are more than 5 kilometers away from here.
This is the basic form of most manufacturing-oriented areas in Dongguan and even Shenzhen, and even Foxconn, a world-class company, is surrounded by a large number of self-built houses in urban villages. For small businesses, it is the norm for industrial plants and urban villages to be intertwined and intermingled.
A company that produces data cables inhabits here.
This company, on the 6th floor of a building called Chuangdian Building in the community, covers an area of only about 600 square meters, and the scale is more like a small workshop that produces clothing.
In the production of mobile phone wires, the most important process is to connect the joints at both ends and the glue wire in the middle, and then it is produced after injection molding, testing, wire binding and other processes.
Miss Cai, who recruits workers for this company, has been appearing at Baihao Square every day recently. She said in an interview that since 2022, because of the large number of customers in Dongguan, the company has moved here from Zhongshan, and the workers have been newly recruited last year. Under normal circumstances, the enterprise has about 15 workers responsible for production.
On the ninth day of the Lunar New Year this year, the company officially started, and only 4 workers arrived on the same day, and then 2 workers returned to work one after another. Therefore, it is necessary to recruit 9 people in the near future to maintain normal production.
The training period for new employees is 22 days, the basic salary is 2100, and the overtime pay is 16 per hour$2. If you work 11 hours a day, 22 days a month, employees can have more than 4,600 yuan. The company includes food and lodging, two meals a day. Miss Cai said.
According to such a salary package, the company's recruitment after the Spring Festival did not meet expectations. Miss Cai said that in more than 20 days from the ninth day of the new year to now, the company has only recruited two people. "More than a dozen people came in one after another, but they only worked for half a day to a day and left, and the flow was very fast. ”
Miss Cai analyzed that after the Spring Festival, more than ninety percent of factories are recruiting, and job seekers can choose more positions, "I heard that the treatment and working conditions in other places are good, and I must try again, in our opinion, this is also a normal phenomenon." ”
In terms of age, Ms. Cai hopes to recruit younger workers as much as possible to learn faster, and if they are older workers, they must be experienced in the industry.
Lao Liang (pseudonym), who is in his 40s, is one of the familiar hands of the company and is now the production supervisor.
Lao Liang used to repair household appliances in his hometown in Guizhou, but in 2007, he came out to work and entered an electronics factory in Shajing, Shenzhen, with a salary of only more than 1,000 yuan. After working for 5 years, I came to Dongguan and traveled to many places, and only came to this company last year.
Today's young people are afraid to enter the factory. Many people work for half a day and then leave, and when I was looking for a job in the past, everyone was very stable, and they stayed in one factory for several years. Today's children, the economic conditions of the family are better than we were at that time, they make their own money and spend it, and they leave when they are uncomfortable, unlike when we had to send money to the family. When it comes to the difficulty of recruitment, Lao Liang also blames some changes in the times and economic reasons.
Lao Liang bluntly said that since 2015, the companies he has been to have basically had the problem of "labor shortage". "Now the company's employee turnover rate is 50%, and it will be replaced after the Spring Festival every year, which has a great impact on the production and operation management of the enterprise, and the most important thing is that the order cannot be completed on time. ”
Therefore, when Lao Liang reports the output to the person in charge of the enterprise, he can only report according to the existing people at hand, so as not to affect the customer's expectation of the order.
Prospects for technological upgrading
Small enterprises are trying their best to recruit workers, while large enterprises are much easier to recruit, and the fundamental reason is that the employee turnover rate of large enterprises after the Spring Festival is not high.
A scale of more than 2,000 people, the production of electronic products battery and power battery enterprise related person in charge of Mr. Wei told the reporter, the eighth to the tenth of the first month, the proportion of enterprises to return to work reached 85%, after the fifteenth day of the first month, nearly 90% of the employees of the company returned to work, therefore, the company currently needs to recruit about 200 positions.
In order to meet the recruitment needs of enterprises, the relevant departments of Dongguan City are not idle.
The Dongguan Municipal Bureau of Human Resources and Social Security has designated February 2023 as the "Spring Breeze Action and Employment Assistance Month" to connect Dongguan enterprises and migrant workers. At the beginning of February, the bureau held a special recruitment event in Yulin, Guangxi, to select and launch 5170,000 job openings, involving 1,087 high-quality companies.
The demand for enterprises is so positive, it is nothing more than that the manufacturing industry is the pillar of Dongguan's economy, and the added value of the secondary industry has reached more than 650 billion yuan, accounting for nearly 60% of GDP.
However, similar to Lao Liang's small-scale enterprise with only a dozen people, it is obviously more difficult to recruit workers.
The company's demand for skilled workers is increasing year by year, and the current general workers account for about 6% of the company's employees, of which skilled workers account for about 10% of the general workers. This is due to the company's increasing investment in intelligent manufacturing, which has improved the automation technology of battery cell production and battery assembly. After the Spring Festival this year, the positions recruited by enterprises are mainly for skilled workers at or above the college level, reducing the demand for ordinary industrial workers. Mr. Wei said.
He said that in recent years of recruitment, enterprises have also raised the threshold of academic qualifications and learning ability of recruiting general workers. For in-service general workers, the company will also organize first-class education to improve the overall quality of general workers.
In the factory where Lao Liang works, the proportion of machines used is higher than more than ten years ago, but it is more like an electric sewing machine-style machinery, replacing manual sewing, and there are not many parts that really realize automation upgrades. The main processes, such as the connection of the adapter head and the wire, are more labor-dependent.
Therefore, in addition to his own understanding of product processes and processes, more of them are general workers who have only worked for a few months, which also leads to low profit margins. "Now a data line company can only earn 3 yuan, and the profit is only 5-10%."
Perhaps, after the technology is upgraded, a few workers can be competent for the fully automated production of data lines.
Behind the industrial upgrading, technical training and vocational education are needed to lay the foundation for "Made in China".