Editing | Chu Ming

1

Crawfish season is almost here again.

Even one of the most experienced crayfish eaters, but also on the factory of this red "lobster sea" fear - the assembly line rolled down thousands of crayfish, through the machine washing, cooking, sent to the front of the peeling shrimp workers, are baskets of Baskets of lobsters to be peeled.

People may have heard, cooking shrimp division has long been a popular specialty of some colleges and universities. This year, Hubei Qianjiang "crayfish College" graduates are booked before graduation. Eat flavor is not only the shrimp cook, but also "peeling shrimp workers. China each year to eat more than a million tons of crayfish, including lobster rice and other shrimp products need to peel shrimp workers to complete. What is the concept of a million tons of lobster? If a kilogram of 20 crayfish, each lobster length of 10 centimeters to calculate, these lobsters can be from the Earth all the way to the moon, and then back from the moon, so round trip twice.

The enthusiasm for eating shrimp, coupled with the scarcity of shrimp peelers, so that the price of crayfish shrimp all the way up. As most of the peeling shrimp workers are women, shrimp factory boss recruitment at all costs to make the "beauty plan" - "factory single beauty, welcome to the factory to choose a spouse.

Peeling shrimp is not an easy task. Liu Jie is 25 years old, in Anqing, Anhui Province, has been doing three years peeling shrimp workers. At work, her right hand to take a pair of tweezers, left hand grabbed over a shrimp: go to the head of the shrimp 0.5 seconds, tweezers open shrimp shell 0.5 seconds, pull out the shrimp meat 1 second, go to the shrimp line 0.5 seconds, thrown to the front of the shrimp meat loaded with a light-colored basket 0.5 seconds, the whole process took 3 seconds.

As a local shrimp peeler in the speed of the best, she can earn 9,000 dollars a month by peeling crayfish. Looking at the peak season of crawfish will come, the factory shrimp peelers there are still hundreds of people in the gap.

"It's too hard to recruit." Liu Jie said. Shrimp peelers are both a physical job and a technical job, paid by the piece. The good news is that this year's shrimp prices have risen again, peeling 1 catty of shrimp meat wages subsequently rose from 9 yuan to 10 yuan. But Liu Jie such a wage is not anyone can earn, because every 3 pounds of shrimp to peel out 1 pound of shrimp meat.

The size of the crayfish according to the size is divided into 4 levels, 1 level of the largest, 4 level of the smallest, a catty 2 level shrimp balls, usually about 150 shrimp. And to earn 9,000 yuan a month, you have to peel more than 100,000 shrimp each month.

Peeling more than 100,000 shrimp a month, not all the difficulties of doing this business. Peeling shrimp need to stand the whole work, and the peak season is usually only four months, the other time must find something else to fill the job. Plus the whole plant is filled with a crayfish cooking odor, as fishy as the sea breeze.

Liu Jie never ate spicy crayfish because she got tired of smelling it too much.

Not many people are willing to work as shrimp peelers. Liu Jie factory had recruited a crayfish enthusiasts, and then due to peeling shrimp too slow, can only earn more than 3,000 dollars a month, they left. There are also people who get dizzy when they enter the factory and smell the smell.

The boss is also worried, according to this trend, next year can not recruit people, but also have to raise wages, shrimp prices have to follow.

Hubei Qianjiang a crayfish food company production workshop, more than 5,000 peeling shrimp workers skillfully peeling shrimp, most of the workers are temporarily summoned. Photo/ Visual China

2

Zhou Yang, the owner of an electronics factory in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, found that more than a hundred employees in the factory, after the New Year, only ten people returned, and even the janitor quit. "Previously envisioned to be able to come back half, and then recruited half, now have to start from scratch to recruit."

There are times of the year when Zhou Yang is particularly alarmed. For example, when the 618 promotion, the factory is in urgent need of manpower, but this time there are always employees who take leave, saying that the wheat is ripe in their hometown, and they want to go back to cut the wheat. "If you do not agree, the other party directly resigned on the spot, but I recruit a person how not easy ah, can only be approved." And then there is the Spring Festival, he gave a few good work young people called over, the other side said not to do the assembly line, changed to send takeaway to go.

Born in 1997, Li Haoran last year or Zhou Yang's employees, this year he has his own ideas. He summed up six "do not do": "standing work do not do, there is a smell of the factory do not do, there is noise do not do, food is not good do not do, poor dormitory environment do not do, no WIFI and air conditioning do not do."

So Li Haoran really quit, because he realized that his "6 don'ts" excluded almost all assembly line jobs. But he's not worried about not having food, because he can still do takeout and delivery.

In order to retain workers, the boss Zhou Yang also took some pains. For example, he specializes in the staff dormitory added a number of couples room, the room does not have a bunk bed, but put a double bed, the bed is also installed bed curtains. And he repeatedly lowered the recruitment requirements, three years ago to recruit 40 years of age, one year ago to recruit 45 years of age, and now as long as it is 55 years of age, "hands and feet can move to call" all.

Once, he felt the need to improve the quality of workers, the "do not recruit tattooed" written into the recruitment notice, but later found that this came to apply for people directly less than half, so he simply turned a blind eye.

Even so, it still can not recruit people. This year's workers gap is too large, he can only entrust the labor company, each recruited to a person, to the other side of the commission of 2,000 yuan.

Doing work to the commission, almost become a labor-intensive enterprises of an unspoken rule. Workers generally called "back to the fee", Foxconn, small to some coastal cities, small factories, will be required to dry enough how long to return how much money as a return, in order to retain employees. Do not comply with such rules, the factory will not be able to recruit workers. But this brings a bad result: often in the moment of getting back to the fee, is the moment employees leave the factory. The loss of personnel faster.

A factory in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, organized a New Year's Eve dinner at the end of the year to reward the employees on duty.

3

For Zhou Yang, recruiting this year is just difficult, not to the point of not being able to recruit at all. And Zhang Jinfang's nursing home in Handan, Hebei province, could close any day. Her nursing home is geared toward rural groups, charging 2,700 yuan a month to take care of mostly widows and orphans who are semi-caregivers or incapable of taking care of themselves.

But while there are many elderly people, there is a shortage of caregivers. Once she unprecedentedly waited for a 26-year-old girl to interview. Before that, the youngest caregiver in her nursing home was 55, so she was willing to pay 4,500 yuan to keep the girl. That figure is quite a bit higher than the average local wage.

"Two hours." Zhang Jinfang remembers clearly, "The girl worked for 2 hours and left."

She could also figure it out because nursing home caregivers are so tired. The caregivers work at least 12 hours a day, sometimes overnight, and if an elderly person rings the bell, they have to be the first to go over to see what's going on. Most of the old people wake up early, at 6 o'clock to get up, but also to help each of them to wash and dress. Generally speaking, each caregiver has to take care of seven elderly people, and just taking turns chatting, walking, and feeding them every day has already filled up the time. At night, some of the elderly also have to be put to sleep, otherwise they can not sleep.

The caregivers who look after the elderly in nursing homes are generally older. Photo/ Visual China

Today, Zhang Jinfang's nursing home has 40 elderly people and only six caregivers. She often has to feed and wash the elderly as well. Sometimes, when the elderly are incontinent, she has to clean them up, too. When people are really old, dignity often becomes a luxury, and Zhang Jinfang to do is to give them the last decent.

In the face of the elderly, she can often rise up a kind of empathy, "see them, always think of my own old age."

Her dream is to grow old in her own nursing home.

If "what to do when you're old" isn't something young people need to think about, there's another industry that's in short supply, and it's one that affects the physical and mental health of many people.

Li Yan is a psychiatrist at a tertiary hospital in Zhejiang. His hospital has been unable to recruit new psychiatrists for three years, and the lack of physician resources is such that registration is limited to 20 in the morning and 20 in the afternoon.

In addition to psychiatry, pediatrics also has a large shortage of doctors. Li Yan said, "pediatrics night shift a lot, and almost impossible to have a break, every moment there are patients, families are also prone to tantrums. And pediatrics is not profitable, because the dose of children's medication are very small, at the same time are some of the more common diseases, China is not an old saying, 'this is also too pediatrics,' so willing to do pediatricians on the less".

4

Money is not everything, there are some jobs even if you give enough money, there may not be able to recruit the right people, such as the artificial intelligence industry. Cheng Zilong, who is engaged in the AI industry in Beijing, said, "Now it is to give millions of annual salary, it is also very difficult to recruit a real understanding of AI talent."

Of course, at present, China and foreign countries are in the same track, and now the world is short of talent in this area of artificial intelligence.

Some other industries that are in the wind are a bit high up. Zhou Xiaona, who works for a short video company in China, said that they are now recruiting, on the one hand, from the traditional TV stations and other video shooting and production industry to dig people, "This part of the people is relatively good, because the traditional media are in decline, more money is given.

But what is really hard to recruit is, as they see it, "people who have a sense of the net, know how to plan, can market, and can also shoot and edit".

This is an era of eyeballs, and the most valuable thing is people's attention. Today, it is not a beautifully produced film can attract traffic, "often in the editing of the video, but also deliberately leave a gap, so that the audience spit, so that you can draw closer." And can not accurately grasp this "groove", is a direct reflection of the sense of the net.

"You can't find such a major in the university, because no one will teach you what net sense is." Zhou Xiaona said.

Because they can't recruit the right people, some companies have no choice but to poach people from their competitors, "and people just dig each other up, and end up jacking up industry wages, and the result is often that, out of a lot of money, talent is still lost."

A famous post-95 video content producer at work. Photo/ Visual China

5

Some people go, and some stay. In a garment factory in Guangzhou's Haizhu district, Liu Jing worked from the age of 14 to the age of 22. In her eight years of youth, she always did one thing - lock the edges of clothes. She operates this Bruce four-line lockstitch machine has been with her for many years, skilled to blindfolded can sew on the collar.

Every year in March and April, is the garment factory rush production of summer clothing the busiest season, she has to work 14 hours a day. As a result of sitting on the stool for a long time on the buttock pain, she has to cushion each time 10 centimeters of thick fabric. Because she is so skilled at her craft, her monthly income during the peak season can reach 15,000 yuan. That's the one thing that makes her happy every time she thinks about it, "Even though I didn't even finish high school, I was paid quite a bit more than my peers."

But she also wonders, "Am I going to sew collars for the rest of my life?"

A small consolation is that if she left this factory, any garment factory would snap her up, even though she would be doing just the same job as before.

No one will be too cutting-edge, and no one will do what's too hard and tiring. But no matter which industry, the most popular is always the people with skills. Even if you can only take care of the baby, in Beijing, if you do the gold medal sister-in-law, you can get more than 20,000 yuan a month.

The plumber Jia Shuguang has been in Beijing for 12 years. When the life of the North just started, he was just a laborer, earn less than 3,000 yuan a month, often want to give up. Good thing he stayed down, finally caught up with the scarcity of skilled plumbers, wages rise every year good times. "There are fewer and fewer young people willing to do this, so we old people are in demand." Last year, his daily income as a plumber has reached 500 yuan.

This year, he became a foreman and started hiring some people to do the work for him. But he found that it is too difficult to find a reliable plumber, to be booked a month in advance.

He still finds it easier to work on his own than to hire someone.

Workers concentrate in a workshop in Shanghai. Photo/ Visual China

(All figures in this article are pseudonyms at the request of the interviewee.