Why don’t young people go to factories anymore? Where have they gone?

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After the Spring Festival in 2018, I successively visited some customers - more than a dozen manufacturing companies located in the Pearl River Delta cities, and found that companies that started operations early had already gone online. After working for a week, many workers in many factories still haven't shown up for work.

In Huizhou, Guangdong, a factory that makes wood products has orders scheduled for August, but the boss lady H is worried.

H said that now we are really afraid of the Chinese New Year. Some workers have just passed the New Year’s Day and start asking for leave to go home. If they are not approved, they will resign directly.

I asked, what should I do?

She said, please hire temporary workers, there is no way to deliver the goods, and now it is difficult to hire temporary workers.

This is a company that I started working for last year. Unexpectedly, I just tasted the sweetness of online marketing, but now I am facing the dilemma of having orders but no one can fill them.

While H was busy making tea, he made a phone call to arrange for a girl from the human resources department to print recruitment advertisements and post them near the factory.

She asked, Teacher Yue Liang, is there any website that is easier to use for recruitment?

I said, if you are recruiting ordinary skilled workers, you can try posting recruitment information on websites such as 58.com and Ganji.com; if you are recruiting masters, you can go to some industry talent websites; if you are recruiting management and sales professionals Yes, Zhitong and Zhuobo are both okay.

In recent years, the manufacturing industry has been promoting "machine replacement", but some positions are still irreplaceable by machines.

In Dongguan, Guangdong, known as a "famous manufacturing city," many factories have encountered the same problem.

Although the boss had asked the HR department to emphasize repeatedly before the holiday that the boss would prepare a big red envelope for the start of work, this trick did not seem to be of any use.

People who come late will still come late, but they believe that it is better late than never. After all, it takes a lot of time to train a novice.

Many factories have to wait while starting work.

But those young people who went home early for the New Year, will they come back again?

I happened to see the following article in the Kaidi community a few days ago, which may give us some answers and inspiration.

It will be difficult to recruit workers after 2001

Every year after the New Year, there will be reports saying that it is difficult for companies to recruit workers.

Especially in coastal manufacturing bases, in the past ten years, there has been no year without noisy: I can’t recruit people!

Think about before 2008, if those born in the 1970s wanted to enter a decent factory, they had to ask acquaintances, treat guests and give gifts, etc., just like grandchildren.

What now? On the other hand, no young people want to work in factories anymore, and the bosses are no longer good at it. They lick their faces and say nice things, and even cajole and deceive, and it is difficult to recruit people.

In the past, 90% of the urban residents in coastal cities were the children of workers, but these people have stopped being workers at all. Young people in the suburbs also despise being workers. Even if there is no other way out, they have to work. Find a leisurely management position in the factory and dawdle around half-heartedly.

A large number of small and medium-sized manufacturing industries are currently in a bad world. The reason why they can barely survive is because they are supported by a group of migrant workers born in the 1960s and 1970s. They are old and young, and they dare not take a break. , and dare not make trouble. The motivation for them to work hard is that their children will never work as workers in the factory again, and they can change the fate of the family. If in another ten years, when these people retire or can no longer work, there will really be no workers in the manufacturing workshops.

Nowadays, those born in the 80s and 90s mainly work in factories to find a partner to fall in love with and gain experience, and are not interested in learning majors or studying technology at all. This group of people has no chance, has lost their ideals, is desperate, and will be ruined before they get rich.

02Where have the migrant workers gone?

Nowadays, urban children have basically completed the transformation by relying on the accumulation of their parents. It is impossible for them to go to work in factories. That is something they look down upon. What's wrong? They all agree that doing anything is more comfortable and more profitable than being a worker. The glory of being a worker in the planned economy era is gone forever.

Therefore, factories are full of migrant workers, and there are fewer and fewer migrant workers, wages are getting higher and higher, and other costs are rising every year. In the end, the products have no price competitiveness.

What is even more frightening is that the concept in society has completely changed, and no one takes workers seriously. If a boy says that he works in a factory, even the daughters of migrant workers will despise him. In this kind of public opinion environment, how can these manufacturing industries continue to play? They really can't continue to play.

So where did the migrant workers go?

Mainly became “second-generation agricultural college students”.

After graduation, they wandered around every corner of the big city with hope, but no hope.

I hope that in the singing, in the poetry and in the so-called distance, I will become numb and become Buddhist while listening.

Their most common occupations are real estate agents, various salespersons, etc. It is difficult for them to do so if they are over 30 years old. This is also the difficulty of China's economy.

I once inspected a traditional manufacturing factory in the Pearl River Delta. There were very few young operators in the workshop, and the youngest was 30 years old.

On the contrary, in the management area, finance, personnel, sales, etc. are all young people, because these jobs are relatively decent.

Because the second generation of farmers have also graduated from college, their parents will never let their children work in the workshop. They themselves will also feel that there is really no future in that place.

Ten years from now, if the factory closes down, and unless something unexpected happens, these second-generation rural college students in their 30s will lose their jobs in large numbers after making a big fuss.

03 Examination and Playing with Yourself

I once chatted with an acquaintance. He said that there were several college graduates in his village who did not go to work all year round and stayed at home to take exams. All kinds of professional qualification certificates are very busy.

Some simply become self-employed, delivering goods and transportation, or even playing in self-media. Definitely not one of them worked in the factory as a worker.

If this continues, will small and medium-sized manufacturing still have a future?

From the perspective of employment, the ratio of administrators and operators is reasonable in China at 1:8 and in Germany at about 1:4.

However, the admission rate of Chinese college students exceeds 70%. Counting the existing labor force, there is also a serious structural imbalance. There are too many college students. How to digest them?

Once the property market turns cold, a large number of intermediaries and self-employed individuals with related supporting services will immediately lose their jobs. By then, these second-generation rural college students will be in a difficult position and will be unemployed on a large scale. This is a hidden worry.

Manufacturing factories need a large number of science students, but now the profits of enterprises are thin, which has led to a large number of outstanding students choosing to work in service industries such as finance, law, and intermediaries, saying they will never enter factories.

These people move from the production field to the distribution field, resulting in the lower and lower quality of personnel in the production industry.

Don’t believe in high-tech research and development (photovoltaics). To put it bluntly, it’s just buying a set of imported high-tech machines. If you look at "machine tool machining centers", they are basically from Italy and Germany. As long as there is a slight setback, the company will collapse.

Ordinary employees most hope to pay off all the profits of the company at the end of the year. With housing prices so high, it is the most affordable way to split the money. They don't like to set aside profits for research and development and accumulation. If the company collapses, we can just find another company next year.

Don’t bosses, big and small, have this mentality? Is it easy to earn some money through hard work? It’s better to use the money to engage in finance and real estate! However, from a higher macroeconomic perspective, the result is that the streets are full of unemployed people.

04 The truth about the labor shortage

The so-called labor shortage is a lose-lose for both enterprises and young people.

The current labor market is a mismatch between supply and demand. A large number of young people have no skills, but because of the high cost of living, they also need high wages; companies with high costs are unable to pay, and the two sides are in a stalemate.

Young people, looking for horses, can change jobs at any time; companies are faced with a large number of novices, and the initial training costs are in vain. In fact, college students also have a bad life, and companies also have a bad life, a lose-lose situation.

Companies only want skilled migrant workers, not college students. They think they are too squeamish and have too many things to do. It's hard to manage people with brains, right? Nowadays, a company only recruits 10 people, but says it wants to recruit 100 people. The reason is that it wants to choose more people, but in fact the salary is low; and migrant workers are misled by some high-profile news and have too high expectations for wages.

So on the one hand, companies can’t find people, and on the other hand, migrant workers can’t find jobs. The stalemate between companies and workers was reported and interpreted as a labor shortage. Therefore, the truth behind the labor shortage is the lack of skilled workers and hard laborers.

First, China has destroyed “technical schools”. 75% of middle school students in Germany went to technical schools, while 90% of middle school students in China went to universities (mainly liberal arts).

In the past, people who graduated from technical schools went to factories, but now they go to colleges and universities to make money, and they imprison people alive for three or four years, cultivating a group of talented people. The remaining crooked people are less and less good at work, have high ambitions and low abilities. They don’t want to do ordinary jobs, cannot do really technical jobs, and companies simply don’t dare to hire them. If a batch of products is bad, the loss is far greater than the saved wages. The training cycle for skilled workers is too slow, so there is a rush for workers. To put it bluntly, there are many workers, but not many with some skills, so companies cannot use them.

I once observed a company, an ordinary manufacturing company. Except for the boss’s family, all the company’s employees were college students, and the others all graduated from middle school. They also did a good job in daily computer management. In the past few years, this company has also recruited several college students to do administrative management and personnel management. However, they just took the "Civil Service Examination" or "English Level 6" books to review when they went to work. They were unable to communicate with migrant workers, their work was so-so, and they complained a lot. , there is really no way to use it.

The second is hard work, such as transportation. Young people don’t want to do it, but middle-aged and old people can’t do it. I know a small decoration contractor who worked hard in a certain first-tier city for fifteen years and bought a house and a car for his son.

My son now works in a small company, with a monthly salary of less than 4,000 yuan. It is normal for a decoration worker to earn 8,000 yuan a month, but food and accommodation are too difficult, so my son decisively refused.

05 The good days of the post-90s generation

Most of the rural employees born in the 1990s grew up drinking Coke and eating McDonald's. When they first came out to work, they encountered the new " The strong protection of the Labor Contract Law does not care about the difficulties of enterprises at all.

Post-90s employees will only compare their living conditions and treatment with the boss’s son, and then develop a resentment mentality. It is difficult to maintain this state for long. Our country's economy will surely face a test.

Many companies offer a salary of 4,000 to 7,000 yuan in recruitment. In fact, it is "piece rate and no social security payment". Novices cannot get these at all.

In the future, machines will slowly replace part of the human workforce. A friend bought a machine for about 100,000 yuan, which replaced two skilled workers. The efficiency has greatly increased. It used to take a day, but now it takes half an hour.

Machines do not need to pay social security, nor do they need "dismissal compensation". Of course, most types of work still need to be completed manually.

But if one less person is used here, there will be an extra labor force there, which is generally useful.

Labor relations are unstable, there is a large turnover of employees, and there are fewer and fewer workers who are familiar with specific positions in the company, so it is a joke to be a high-tech, high-quality, and high-efficiency company.

However, the burden on enterprises is too heavy, there is excess production capacity, and they are unable to provide high welfare, creating a vicious cycle.

The result is that the vast majority of manufacturing industries compete at a low level. If you spend three years training workers at a high cost, they will all resign overnight.

For the manufacturing industry, finance, bosses, and workers will not be satisfied at the same time.

China's manufacturing industry has thin profits and a large number of employees. It is still in its infancy. Before it reaches the level where high technology can spread all over the world, it is impossible for "finance, bosses, and employees" to be happy at the same time.

The current situation is: the finances are satisfactory, the employees are satisfied, and the small boss is no longer optimistic. The consequence of the missing link is that employment pressure skips enterprises and goes directly to various places.

How to reduce the burden on small and medium-sized enterprises and optimize the business environment of private enterprises? In fact, everyone knows that this is the beginning of a good life for the post-90s generation.

Finally, to upgrade your cognition and deepen your thinking, let’s start with reading.

Source: Kaidi Maoyan

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E-commerce Yuetan, a WeChat public account focusing on the transformation of traditional enterprises into e-commerce: mriter.

Main author: Yue Liang, e-commerce columnist, Internet transformation mentor for traditional enterprises, online marketing consultant for many companies, 13 years of experience in e-commerce operations and online marketing research, WeChat public account: mriter. Please keep the author’s information and indicate the source when reprinting