Fifteen years of wage work, and the layoff list is what it buys you
I have been working for other people for fifteen years now. The longest stretch at one firm was almost six. I was cut at 35, with no buildup beforehand.
So what if you are conscientious? What came back was a layoff.
That is not a mood. It is the judgement left over after I thought it through: wage labour is the most unstable road, and the one with no exit. It looks stable — one day a month, the money lands on time, the figure barely moves. But that stability is the brittlest kind there is: you hand one company your only income, your only evaluator and your only hours, and then you call that stability. If a single supplier took 100% of your revenue you would not call that stable either; you would call it dependence. The firm does exactly this to me, only upside down.
In the previous essay I wrote the pay cut out in full: salary from 20,000 yuan to under 15,000, the housing-fund deposit from over 5,000 a month on both sides to a little over 1,000 — add those two columns and it is close to half gone. I will not redo that arithmetic. This essay is about one thing: why the work is harder now.
Money landing every month is not stability, it is a schedule
The word “wage” lies, because it lets “on schedule” stand in for “certain”.
A schedule describes the rhythm of payment; certainty describes the obligation to pay. The law holds the first half and not the second: payday cannot move, but whether to keep employing you at all is left to the firm’s operating discretion. So my contract governs how it pays each month. It does not govern how long it pays.
I am the one being subscribed to. Every property of a subscription is here: it can stop whenever, I cannot set the price, my history of usage converts into no entitlement at all, they discount me when times are good, and when costs have to be cut my line is first in line — because in the ledger my line is labelled cost, not asset.
Whether this road is stable has never been mine to assess. It has one source: whether it still pays next month.
And this is no longer just my personal situation; it is a scale inside the statistics. MOHRSS has described China’s flexible-employment population as over 200 million; measured against roughly 740 million jobs nationally that is 27%, and against the 470 million urban workforce it is close to 43%. Yet by the end of 2024 only 70.57 million of those people were enrolled in the employees’ basic pension scheme and 66.159 million in employees’ medical insurance — an enrolment rate under 40%.
So stable employment has not become rarer. It has become thinner: the same person moves from staff, to outsourced contractor, to invoicing as an individual. That is the route I have taken these past years. With every thinning, the legal employer sits one step further away; at the last step you have to think for a while before you even know who to sue.
The outsourcing pool is not a job category, it is a moving company for liability
The outsourced workforce grows every year. That is not new jobs appearing. It is firms hauling their own share of risk outside the door, and the empty space they leave behind is called outsourcing.
What was being hauled out? Contributions calculated on the real wage; the housing-fund deposit; annual leave; work-injury liability; severance when people are cut; and after ten years, an open-ended contract. Every one of those is a long-term cost. What outsourcing does is convert that whole stack of long-term obligations into one monthly service-fee invoice.
Same head, same work, cost unchanged — only the bookkeeping moved. The line shifts on the client’s ledger from “staff remuneration” to “outsourcing services”. The difference between those two words is very practical: staffing is something you owe people; procurement is something you can cut.
I don’t have to guess at the scale either. The ACFTU’s ninth survey of the working-class workforce puts China’s workers in new forms of employment at 84 million. Strictly that number is the couriers, the drivers, the platform workers — not exactly the same people as the outsourced staff in an office tower. But it is the same water: whatever regular employment gives up flows into these new names.
The clever part of dumping responsibility is that it never has to break the law. Somebody pays your insurance, somebody pays your wage, somebody even signed a contract with you — except the company that signed it owns nothing besides you. Sue it and there is nothing to execute. Don’t sue it and tomorrow it hands you back to the next client. It is the cushion. Being flattened is literally the job it was hired to do.
Out at thirty-five, I found only four kinds of “proper job” left
The day I was cut I thought the hard part would be finding work. What I found is that “a proper job” no longer exists as a category. It has been broken into four discounts.
The first: five insurances and one fund paid at the minimum base. The payslip looks fine, but your contributions go in at the floor. This does not cut this month’s income — it cuts the money thirty years from now, because whatever is written on the base is what gets computed for you later. It does not reduce today; it reduces tomorrow. (This one is changing this year, and I run the result of the change in the next section.)
The second: no housing fund at all. I did that account in the last essay: the deposit fell from over 5,000 a month on both sides to a little over 1,000, which already failed to cover the mortgage. Drop it to zero and the whole payment comes out of after-tax salary. “No fund” never appears in the job headline. It appears on the page of fine print you are asked to sign.
The third: one rest day a week.
The third is the one you can actually measure, because it comes with a number attached. The NBS figure for average weekly hours of enterprise employees was 48.6 hours across 2025; the 1995 State Council rule on working hours sets the legal standard at eight hours a day, 40 hours a week.
Let me do that division: 48.6 minus 40 is 8.6 hours a week; over 52 weeks that is 447 hours, and converted into eight-hour days it is 56 working days a year done for free. One rest day is more direct: fifty-two Sundays a year that were supposed to be yours.
48.6 is an average, not anybody’s individual week. But the average alone already sits 8.6 hours above the legal line — which tells you overtime is not one bad employer’s habit. It is the default setting of the industry.
The fourth: outsourcing. This one does not touch the payslip; it touches the column that says whose you are. The first three take money you would have received and hours you would have lived; the fourth takes the nameplate. Same floor, same desk, same backlog of requirements — and the employer has become the company that signs your contract instead.
And this is the cruelest of the four, because it stacks. Inside one outsourcing contract you can have the insurances at the floor, the housing fund trimmed away where it can be trimmed, and one rest day a week — four discounts hung on one person at the same time. So strictly speaking these are not four kinds of job. They are four charges that can be combined.
Not one of the four appears in a headline. They appear in the contribution statement, in the fine print, in the shift rota, and in that ledger which lists two columns of people working in the same office area. When a firm tenders it quotes a low price. So do they, for people.
Make the base honest and the salary comes down: a firm prices the whole package
The first discount is changing. This year enforcement got strict: contributions are meant to follow the wage actually paid, so now even the outsourcing contracts pay in full. It looks as though the wage worker won a round.
The price arrives right behind it. A post that used to offer 16,000 now offers 14,000. The contribution base moved off the floor and onto the real number, and the money landing in my account went down instead. The wool still grows on the sheep’s back — the cost did not leave the outsourcing firm. It was moved onto me: out of the company’s column and into the price of the person.
To see this you only have to change one angle: when a firm prices a worker it never looks at what lands in your account, it looks at what it costs to have you. That total is fixed first — salary, the employer’s share of the insurances, the housing fund, the service fee paid to the vendor — and only then is it written across two lines: how much becomes the wage you can see, how much becomes the contributions you cannot.
So “the company pays your share” is the most successful piece of advertising in this whole algorithm. The share it pays was my money all along; it is only money I do not control. I used to read it as a benefit, until I wrote myself a calculator that takes a monthly salary and unfolds it into the employer’s total cost, line by line. The unfolding leaves one sentence: that budget does not grow because a firm becomes compliant.
In this round of compliance exactly one coin came back into my hand. The housing fund goes into my own account — I can see it and I can draw it. Medical and pension go into the pooling side, and that I cannot draw. And the pooling side runs essentially pay-as-you-go: what a working person pays in today is not saved for that person’s old age; it is paid out this month to the people who are already retired.
I did that second account in the essay about my mother and I will not run it twice: on one side a rural old age of a little over two hundred yuan a month, on the other an urban retirement of several thousand to ten thousand, and the one paying is a working stiff like me. This money of mine is not waiting for me — it was paid out first to a generation that today is full of vigour.
So what “pay on the real base” actually did to me is this: I went from taking a low wage while the firm quietly saved the invisible part, to taking a lower wage while I fund the invisible part myself. Nominally it is compliant now; the price is still the same price. What changed is which column the money sits in, and who signed for it.
A second-class citizen inside a big firm: I work for the client, I belong to the vendor
In the end I took an outsourced seat inside a large firm. Why? Honestly: had the family not been hit back to back — me out in the first half of the year, my wife out in the second, her company still owing a full year of wages and the case still in court — I would never have taken this job.
My previous post paid over 20,000 yuan a month with insurance and the fund paid in full, and I still hated it and kept thinking about leaving, because I could see no future in it. Only later did I learn that had been somebody else’s ceiling.
Once you are inside, two ledgers sit in front of you — in the same office park, side by side.
Their ledger: insurance and the fund paid in full, salary about double yours, annual leave cashed out month by month.
Mine: the minimum contribution base, probation at eighty per cent, no annual leave all year. They say take it once you have completed a year — and by the time you complete a year, it is time for you to go. Leave requested at the client counts only as unpaid personal leave. Work a day, get a day’s money; don’t work, get none. Rest more than a certain number of days and the person is handed straight back to the vendor.
Two sequences I still cannot make sensible. First: the contract was not signed yet, but they had me sign the assessment sheet first. Second: the man who assigns me work every day has no contractual relation to me at all, and the company that did sign with me has never seen the work I do.
That is not a management slip. It is what this structure actually produces: evaluation separated from fact, employment separated from responsibility. The person who sets your pay does not know what you do; the person who knows what you do cannot set your pay. And when you want to assert a right, both of them tell you the same sentence: that is not my department.
Article 16 of the Labour Contract Law says the contract text shall be held by the employer and the worker, one copy each. Article 81 covers the other half: where an employer fails to hand the contract text to the worker, the labour administration orders it corrected, and it pays for any damage done.
So “we never signed” is only the crudest version. Sign it, then withhold your page — the law spells that out too. And this kind of breach costs the employer nothing. It only costs you your not knowing.
I work at the client’s, I am managed by the vendor, and my rights belong to whom? That word “whom” is the entire purpose of the design.
There is only one ruler measuring you
When the road is narrow, the cost does not land on the money first. It lands on the evaluation.
Inside a firm there is exactly one person entitled to rate you: your superior. Not the customer, not the market, not the system that keeps running quietly, not whether a new kid comes to me when he hits a wall — that person. He scores me, the score sets the bonus, the bonus and the comment set next year’s raise, and the comment decides whether I stay. One whole chain, all of it starting from one man’s judgement.
Last time I listed what kind of man that can be: cannot lead a team, cannot motivate anyone, only nitpicks, cannot hear what people are asking for, will not mediate a conflict. This time I want the uglier layer: he does not have to be incompetent.
Some leaders genuinely have no craft; the moment was right, the place was right, the people were right, and that is how they got the seat. I have watched that often enough that it no longer surprises me. What surprises me is that authority and competence do not come from the same source. He may have risen on luck, but when he rates me, the pen in his hand is real. If he says you are good, you are good; if he says you are not, then this year you are “needs improvement”.
The cruel part of a single ruler is that it leaves you no reference object. The same work, measured by somebody else, can come out as two different words: competent, needs improvement. The work never moved.
On paper, last place is not incompetence. The company ignores that
Somebody will say: doesn’t the law cover this? It did, in black and white.
Guiding Case No. 18 of the Supreme People’s Court, published in November 2013 (ZTE (Hangzhou) Co., Ltd. v. Wang Peng, a labour-contract dispute), has a holding of exactly one sentence: coming last in an employer’s grading round is not the same thing as being unable to perform the job, so it does not meet the statutory conditions for unilateral termination, and the employer may not terminate on that ground.
In plain speech: a ranking is not a legal reason. A firm that clears people out with the words “you placed last” loses.
So why does it still run every single day? Because it never takes the termination route. It takes the route where you leave by yourself.
Forced distribution sits there in the policy: some share of every department has to carry the lowest grade. Once that grade is on you, the transfer, the shrinking project, the marginalising and the bonus cut all arrive. It doesn’t fire me. It waits me out until I hand in the resignation letter. And the moment that letter is in, this is called “termination proposed by the worker for personal reasons”, and not one yuan of severance has to be paid.
The rulebook I live under has the same shape: a stack of disciplines you must obey, fines and deductions when you don’t; whatever you produce belongs entirely to the company; every clause written from the company’s side. Break a rule, you are fined; something goes wrong, you are blamed; something goes right, it is theirs.
So the question on this layer was never whether the protection exists. It does. It only activates after the thing is already illegal — and being illegal costs less than complying.
The bar for a wage worker goes up every year
The meaner layer is this: the requirements placed on wage workers rise year after year. That is not a feeling; the hiring market has numbers.
In Maimai’s Insight into the Job-Seeking and Hiring of Mid-to-High-End Talent, January–February 2026: over the newly posted roles, more than 70% demand three or more years of experience, and the roles asking for three to five years grew 19% year on year; roles open to people with under one year of experience shrank roughly 20% year on year; 34.39% of new postings write “able to use AI” into the requirements themselves. The report names the phenomenon, and the name is better than mine: de-juniorisation.
Put those sentences side by side and you see the ladder has been pulled out: the bar is lifted to three-plus years while the door under one year is shut. Where do those three years of experience come from? Nobody answers. Every firm is waiting for some other firm to grow that person to year three first.
Now overlay the two timelines.
Supply: on the Ministry of Education’s figures, the 2026 cohort of ordinary higher-education graduates is expected to reach 12.7 million, 480,000 more than last year.
Outcome: on the National Bureau of Statistics, in September 2026 the surveyed urban unemployment rate for labour aged 16–24 excluding students was 18.0%, and for 25–29 it was 7.4%; the average surveyed urban unemployment rate over the first three quarters was 5.2%, level with the same period last year. The official word for this is “employment overall stable”.
I am not denying that stability. Having a job and taking money monthly is the entire cash flow of most households. I am only saying that “overall stable” and “stable for me” are two different questions. That 5.2% average is produced by pulling the two unstablest bands out and listing them separately: the 18.0% column is kids in their early twenties, the 7.4% column is people of twenty-seven, twenty-eight who have already been cut once. List them, then keep them out of the headline — that is how it stays stable.
I turned my own job into an API and kept the forwarding
That 34.39% in the section above: I am the one producing it, every day.
This is how my outsourcing desk actually runs now. The things I used to do by logging into several systems and clicking through them page by page, I converted into interfaces, wrapped as command-line tools, and then wrote the skills files that tell an agent which tool to use, which question maps to which command, and how to reply once it has looked something up. Once that was done, my whole daily job shrank to two moves: forward the question from the group chat to the agent and let it look the thing up, then forward the answer back into the group chat.
What I type into that group is usually one line — “take a look at this question” — with the name of whoever asked. I sit there like an idiot and type fewer than 1,000 characters in a day.
It was not always so. When a request landed I used to work out how the feature should be built, which function to call, which layer the error was coming from, what the fallback should be. That thinking was slow, and the craft grew inside the slowness. None of it is wanted now: I wrote the judgement into the tools and kept the forwarding for myself.
And here is the ceiling of the pipeline. It could run entirely by itself: the agent polls the group for questions, looks them up, posts the answers back. The road is passable, and the reason it does not reach the end is not technology — it is that the thing still answers wrong sometimes, so a person has to review each answer before it goes out.
Let me say that one cleanly: I have never counted how often it is wrong, and I am not going to invent a number. All I know is the rule as it stands: a wrong answer must not see daylight, so some pair of eyes has to pass over it first.
And those eyes are not there because they know the tooling better than the agent does. AI cannot carry the blame. A person can. So on this line the human is not the capability layer, it is the liability layer; not the operator, the guarantor. What is left of my value at this desk is not that I can look things up — it is that I can put my signature behind something that may be wrong.
Reviewing sounds like supervision. It is really a pledge. I stake my name on this batch of answers, and what I am staking is not that I catch more errors than the machine; it is that if anything goes wrong, there is somebody who can be dealt with. A system that leaves the chance of error to the machine and the consequences of error to the person — that is the moving of liability I described earlier, shrunk to the size of my own desk.
At first I told myself this was me improving efficiency. I have done a whole round of that before, and I ran that ledger in my April piece on the AI dividend, so I will not run it twice. I will only say what this round added: the efficiency being taken out this time is mine.
There is a book called Bullshit Jobs — the Chinese translation is titled Pointless Work — by David Graeber, an anthropologist. He describes a category of job, and my first reaction on reading it was my own desk: the person doing it knows privately that the job need not exist; delete it and nobody on any side notices. His point was not low pay and long hours; that is a different suffering, and I accept that one. His point was something else: a management system that buys an adult’s time and spends it on work which the company buying that time does not itself believe is meaningful.
I used to think coasting was a flaw in the person. I can see now that it is a feature of the post. Design a job so that nothing in it has to be thought about, and only two actions are left: wait, and forward.
So when I say I cannot feel any technical content in this work, that is not a complaint, it is a reading of the desk. The value in what I do sits entirely in “I have run this process before”, not in “this process is worth running”. My degree, my record, the certificate I earned fifteen years ago add up to one instruction manual: they prove I can carry out a pointless task smoothly.
It is not that I cannot take the long gown off — Lu Xun’s Kong Yiji could not take his off either, and that gown was already ragged. My reason is cruder: taking it off costs me the pay. To keep a family fed I have said this to myself for months, and every morning I still sit down at that desk and still type those few characters into the group.
The day the debt is cleared and my own hands are on the switches, I will say NO to a post like this one, and I am not going to pretty that up. For now it is only a sentence, and “only a sentence” is the whole of my situation: I know it is worth nothing, and I still show up every day.
A recruiter said on camera that she never wants to do this again
There is a video on Bilibili whose title I would not change by one character: 《稀烂的就业环境，再也不想做招聘了》 — A Wretched Job Market; I Never Want to Do Recruitment Again — by the uploader 彗星carry. A person whose job is hiring says on camera that she never wants to hire again.
I will not write out her words. I don’t put lines into somebody else’s mouth; what she said exists only in her own video. But when a person’s job and that person’s verdict on the job collide, the collision is itself a data point.
Recruiting is the very top of the funnel. Her metrics are headcount filled, time to fill, cost per hire — and not one of those three is hers to budget. The establishment is cut from above, the salary band is drawn by finance, the requirements are written by the business, the candidate pool is whatever the market hands her. The only thing she controls is how hard her hand filters. When the market is hot this is called “talent selection”; when it is cold it is called “talking people out of it”.
And here is the attribution the machinery gives her: if she fills the seat and the person stays and performs, that is the employer brand and her eye for people; if she cannot fill it, if the newcomer quits in three months, if nothing gets done, that is the candidate’s own inability. She stands exactly in the middle of that attribution: on one side a manager who cannot get people, on the other people who cannot get offers.
So when she says she never wants to do this again, I don’t read it as compassion running out. Compassion never moved a metric. It is that her job stopped being hiring and became filtering people out — and filtering people out needs no craft, and needs no her.
I am not going to laugh at an HR. She costs more than I do, and nobody will notify me in advance when they cut her. When the people at the head of the river start to hate their own post, that means the river is not low. It is cut.
Companies only want finished goods, never half-made ones
Firms today want a person usable on day one and never train anyone. I have said that many times; this time I will hang it on one specific rule, because the rule explains it better than “short-sightedness”.
The state did arrange for employer training. A 2002 State Council document required enterprises to set aside education and training funds of 1.5%–2.5% of the total wage bill; a 2006 Ministry of Finance opinion restated it; and in 2018 the pre-tax deduction ceiling for those funds was lifted from 2.5% straight to 8% by that 2018 notice.
The allowance was raised and raised — from 1.5% up to 8%. But the firm does the arithmetic perfectly well: that ceiling is what you may deduct, not what you must spend. Set nothing aside and no penalty exists. Spend it properly and you pay cash, free up working hours, and gamble that the trained person does not leave.
So the answer is not “companies don’t understand long-termism”. It sits in a pure time gap:
Training a person pays back over three years. Cutting a person pays back in one month. A firm that cannot be sure it still exists in three years will always take the month. “Usable on day one” is not greed. It is myopia — and myopia is taught by the environment.
The bill for training ends up split between two parties: schools, who teach a twenty-two-year-old to be actually useful on the employer’s behalf; and the candidate, who ripens himself on the previous employer’s time and then sells himself cheap to the next one. The firm just stands at the door picking somebody already ripe — and then complains he is expensive.
The twenty-per-cent cut in probation is the floor the law drew
In that outsourcing ledger above I wrote one line: probation is paid at eighty per cent. In those months I took home 12,000 yuan.
I assumed that firm was stingy. Then I read the article. Article 20 of the Labour Contract Law: a worker’s wage during probation may not be lower than the lowest grade for the same post in that unit, nor lower than eighty per cent of the wage agreed in the contract, and it may not fall below the local minimum wage.
Which means: the eighty per cent is not one company’s invention; it is the floor the law drew under probation. And every firm takes that floor and uses it as the going price. Once a floor is adopted universally, the floor is the price. Whoever wrote that clause was thinking “don’t let probation be unpaid labour”; the market read it as “probation deserves to lose a fifth”.
The length is fixed too (Article 19): a contract of three months to one year allows one month of probation; one to three years, two months; three years or more, or an open-ended contract, up to six months.
Those six months are a legally sanctioned window for paying you less. And it is not only money. Article 21 says that if an employer terminates during probation it must explain the reason — whether the reason holds up is another matter, but a dismissal notice that just says the candidate did not meet the hiring conditions is already long enough.
On my first day nobody walked me through the hiring conditions item by item. They only show up on the day they are needed.
Fifteen years of service, compensated as twelve
Article 14 of the Labour Contract Law: work for the same employer ten years running, or renew after two consecutive fixed-term contracts, and provided I offer or agree to continue, unless I myself ask for a fixed term, the employer shall sign me an open-ended contract.
That clause really does stand on the side of long employment. Fifteen years in, the law hands me a contract with no expiry date.
But it leaves three exits at the same time: Article 39 (serious misconduct and the like, no compensation at all), Article 40 (medical period exhausted, inability to perform, material change of objective circumstances — thirty days’ notice plus statutory severance), Article 41 (economic lay-offs, severance). An open-ended contract was never an iron rice bowl; it only replaces “the term ended” with “you must give a reason”. A reason, on paper, can always be found.
What actually angers me is the second paragraph of Article 47: if your monthly wage exceeds three times the local average social wage of the previous year, severance is calculated at that three-times figure and the number of years counted may not exceed twelve.
Fifteen years worked, twelve years paid. The extra three convert into nothing.
I read that clause several times to get its shape: it caps the expensive, not the long. My salary probably never reached that three-times line — the point is that the people who have been around longest are precisely the ones who become expensive, and once expensive they hit the cap. Article 87 adds a line: unlawful termination pays damages at double the Article 47 standard. Double sounds firm — but the doubling happens on a base that has already been capped.
That is where seniority shows its real face: the return is capped, the risk is not. For years one through twelve I was measured under the same ruler twelve times. In years thirteen to fifteen the extra time I put in buys no money, it buys one thing: I am more expensive in the market, therefore harder to sell.
The boss is wrong, the bill goes to the employee
Two sets of numbers first, and I will state their scope.
At the close of 2025 annual-report season, 5,511 A-share companies filed, of which 4,043 were profitable (73.44%); the three deepest losses were Vanke A, Greenland Holdings and Red Star Macalline, at -88.556 billion yuan, -26.213 billion yuan and -23.722 billion yuan of net profit attributable to shareholders. In the same year, the value-of-entrepreneurs report compiled on a sample of 5,463 A-share listed firms found 18 executives earning more than 10 million yuan, the highest at 39.98 million, and averaged the top salary of each company at 1.674 million yuan.
Scope, stated plainly: those two sets are not the same companies, and I did not open the pay tables of the three loss-makers and match them line by line. What I am describing is a structure, not one firm’s accounts.
The structure looks like this: losses go to equity, lay-offs go to administrative expense; the decision is minuted in the boardroom and the cost is booked against the desks. A firm that loses eighty billion in a year does not touch the executives’ line — in the annual report that line is called “remuneration of directors, supervisors and senior management”, and it is printed before profit distribution, never after a loss. It has plenty of ways to take the money back out of people: freeze the headcount, stop hiring, cut benefits, and squeeze two decimals more out of the outsourcing rate.
Where did the lost money go? It did not vanish. It only changed lines and landed on somebody with no shares, no options, and no seat in the meeting room.
Shift the risk far enough and it turns into case numbers. In the judicial data the Supreme People’s Court published on 22 October 2025 for January–September of that year, 648,000 first-instance labour disputes were accepted, up 37.5% year on year. That thirty-seven per cent means: in those nine months, more people walked this road. What grew was not awareness of rights. It was the number of people who had been cut out of the cost line.
Some cities are friendly to enterprises and hostile to the people who work there
In April I wrote out a ranking: economic growth above business climate, above the firm’s interest, above the rights of ordinary workers. I will not rearrange that table here. I will add one piece of evidence from this year, because the evidence is far more concrete than the table.
Zunyi in Guizhou issued provisional rules for a “quiet day for enterprises“: from the 11th to the 20th of every month no enforcement body may enter the premises, and in the first half of the year city-wide enterprise inspections fell 25.74% year on year. Wangcheng district in Changsha, Hunan, produced “twelve rules” tightening enterprise inspections in March 2025, then went further in April 2026 and fixed the 6th to the 25th of each month as quiet days — no entering the firm except in seven statutorily listed cases. Chaozhou in Guangdong runs “show the QR code to enter an enterprise” and “one combined check for everything”. The Ministry of Justice itself ran a special campaign in 2025 to regularise enforcement against enterprises.
I am not against “leave them alone”. Multiple agencies, repeated inspections — that genuinely does throttle a business, and the money burned in the process does end up in costs. I accept all of that. Cutting pointless trouble for firms is something I support.
I only want to ask one question: which day is the quiet day for the worker?
Same state, same enforcement resources, one local government. On the calendar issued to enterprises it says plainly: twenty days this month you may not be bothered — with a policy document behind it, a percentage drop, and a report to the level above. On the calendar issued to workers it still says “complaint under consideration“. In the last essay I described how the labour-inspection machine starts up: it does not turn until you walk up to the window. On the enterprise side the state pulls its foot back out of the door by itself; on the worker’s side it waits for you to push.
What does a city use to win a firm? Tax breaks, land, fast approvals, fewer inspections. Not one of those requires consulting a single worker. And workers’ wages, hours, contribution base, whether they are allowed to leave on time — add all of that up and it is precisely the slice of a firm’s cost that is most welcome to be “won away”. Inside the four characters for “attracting investment” there is a default setting: cost on this side is movable, checks on that side must be reduced.
Being friendly to business is not a mistake. A place has to keep its firms alive before it can keep anything else alive. But the word “friendly” stops meaning friendly the moment only one side can use it. Then it is not friendliness; it is taking a side. And taking a side never shows up in the report. It gets written as “employment in the region remains stable”.
The cake has not shrunk much — what changed is how it is sliced
“Those at the bottom get a smaller slice” — I would not dare prove that with distribution data, because when I checked, the official numbers stood against me.
In the National Bureau of Statistics’ June 2026 commentary on the flow-of-funds accounts, the household sector’s share of primary distribution income rose from 62.6% of gross national income in 2020 to 63.5% in 2024, and compensation of labour rose from 52.4% to 54.4%.
Up more than a point in four years. “A smaller slice” is simply not true on the macro ledger. I am not going to cheat myself once just for the feeling of it.
So what exactly shrank?
It shrank in the column that asks: is there a desk left for me next time. A share is how the stock is divided; an opportunity is whether the incremental side has a door at all. That extra fraction the household sector gained is a sum over 1.4 billion people, and it contains sole traders’ operating income, rent and interest — it does not have to leave one single extra place for one specific person.
The knife moved: from dividing by years of service to dividing by scarcity. And the scarcity column is filled with people who arrive already carrying three years (over 70%), people who can demonstrably use AI (34.39%), and younger people willing to hand over both of those for less money. I am not getting a smaller piece. I am not in the queue.
Meanwhile the blame side keeps taking on more. That stack of rules: obey or be fined; when something breaks, name a person — work order, performance grade, circulated notice, none of it missing; everything produced belongs to the company, and no name appears in the signature field. My claim on the cake has not grown; my claim on the fault gets revised upward every year. That is what “harder” means: not less at the table, but first one remembered when something goes wrong.
Too many of us, and so worth nothing
Work fifteen years and a firm will still stop you at the door with a certificate you earned fifteen years ago, and with your age.
For a while I genuinely asked myself whether that was a test of ability. Then I used my wife as the control group: a genuine, full-time bachelor’s degree from a 211 university, her field, and she gets stopped by the age limit just the same. A real degree cannot block one line in that system — which can only mean the gate was never about the degree.
Does she care about your education? She does not care. She cares about one other thing: whether she can extract things from you at a cheap price. Once you are squeezed dry, you are thrown away and a new batch is loaded. Certificates, age, first degree — none of them are standards. They are price filters: what they screen out is not the incapable, it is the expensive, the hard-to-replace, the ones with a family crisis behind them.
And “fifteen years” is the worst line item in that algorithm. The certificate does not depreciate; the person does. A paper from 2013 is still carried at its 2013 price, while the man who sits the exam is now 35, has a bad stomach, and does not dare switch his phone off at ten at night. One asset held at original cost while it has quietly worn out — the firm refuses to recognise the gap. It prices you at original cost and then complains you are expensive.
As for what “outstanding employee” and “advanced collective” are worth, I will be blunt: nobody acknowledges the thing. Acknowledgement is not printed on a certificate. It is printed in four columns — established headcount, contribution base, whether there is annual leave, whose liability a work injury is. Those columns I filled in, line by line, in the outsourcing ledger above. The trophy is handed to you; the four columns are filled in for you.
So the reason there are no rights here comes down to one cold cause: mostly, there are too many of us. Scarcity sets price; abundance sets it to nothing — that is not a moral judgement, it is a supply-and-demand sentence. Three hundred applicants for one desk and the employer is not selecting the fittest, it is selecting the cheapest and the one least likely to make a scene. That is what the 12.7 million I quoted earlier was for.
Which leads to a sentence hard to accept: my position is not set by my ability, it is set by how many people are standing behind me. And those people do not get fewer because I work harder.
Every morning I wake up owing the bank
Six wallets emptied, and a body worked into a set of chronic conditions — stomach, kidneys, enteritis, piles. All of it is a debt, only none of it reaches the balance sheet. At thirty-five I finally scraped together the down payment and bought a flat in one of the most out-of-the-way corners of Hangzhou: 600,000 yuan down, over 1.4 million borrowed, thirty years.
From the day I signed, the arithmetic of my life changed: the first thought every morning is how much I owe the bank.
I used to think a mortgage was just a monthly deduction. It turns out its real function is to confiscate your options. It makes you afraid of any large purchase — that is not frugality, it is arithmetic. It makes you afraid to resign — and that is not loyalty either, it is fear. You keep doing a job you are sick of, because a payment falls due on the tenth of the month, and the day a payment falls due cannot be decided by whether the job makes you sick.
Debt ties a person to one place more tightly than any contract ever signed. And the employee a company likes most is exactly the one carrying a thirty-year mortgage: he will not make a scene, will not leave, and will not say the one sentence that should be said in the meeting. People like me were selected by that system and then signed for it ourselves.
Sometimes I truly think about selling the flat at a loss and going back to my hometown. Bought at 2 million, worth 1.6 million now — I did that sum of 400,000-odd in the last essay and will not redo it. What keeps me stuck is the other line: sell it, and every shift I covered, the knife of being cut, the eighty per cent of probation, all convert into a flat that even a fire sale cannot clear.
On today’s terms I can no longer see any chance in this city of getting ahead through wage work. So one question is left: do I just keep doing this outsourcing seat until they clear me out?
Nobody is going to answer that for me. I have taken it apart as far as it goes, and what remains is three switches.
Three switches, all wired to somebody else
I compress fifteen years into one sentence: the hardest thing about wage work is not the pay — it is that three switches are installed outside my body.
- The price switch. Your wage is set by one negotiation, and after that someone else decides each year whether it moves. Past thirty-five, that one negotiation never happens again.
- The evaluation switch. One ruler: the superior. His competence does not determine how much authority he holds; the reverse is what holds — he got the seat without ever needing to be good at judging people.
- The continuity switch. Contract not renewed, economic lay-off, reorganisation, the client returns the project. Not one of those four words consulted me.
I cannot press any of the three. There is one thing I can press: where the three hours after work go. I refuse to write that as inspiration. It is not inspiration; it is the only part of my budget nobody has approved away.
More of us are waking up. If I cannot fight it, I will refuse to play
Far more people are awake now than a few years ago. I see the same sentence everywhere: I can see through this rulebook, and I still show up on time every day.
You have seen through it — then what? I cannot fight it. A man with a thirty-year mortgage, a child in school and a court case for his wife does not fight anything. I am not going to pretend about that. What I can do is the other thing: non-violent non-cooperation — refusing to take part in a game that is neither fair nor reasonable.
Japan had a generation like that. They did not strike and they did not take the street. They simply would not take the price: no overtime, no flat, no marriage, no upgrading — desire lowered until the system could not compute a profit out of them. Some call it the low-desire society, some call it lying flat. I am not going to grade that generation. I understood one thing from it: the only power a crowd still holds is its refusal to cooperate.
Mine, written out, is shabby. But every line of it is something I can actually do:
- I refuse to cooperate with “pressure makes you stronger”. I cancelled the one credit card I held and I take no instalments. That is not self-discipline; it is that I stopped agreeing to do their interest maths.
- I refuse to hand my life to the company. I keep my strength on what is portable — whether people come to me when something is hard, not the report sitting on my desk.
- I refuse to believe “next month will surely be better”. I arrange every expense on the assumption that this job can end any week. That is not pessimism. It is moving their schedule onto my own ledger.
- I refuse the label they stick on me. They call me cost. I do not argue back that I am an asset — I am neither. I am a supplier who invoices monthly. And the first rule of a supplier is not to depend on one customer.
None of that fixes anything macro. One person refusing is invisible in a report. It settles one small thing only: I no longer lie under this machine while also telling myself the machine is telling the truth.
A desk a high-schooler could mind, posted as wanting a 985 graduate
Bluntly: the work I do now could be minded by a high-schooler who can use a computer. The genuine difficulty is knowing which system holds which answer and which result to trust — and I have already written that into the skills file, so the agent knows it too.
That is not what the posting says. A very basic job will have “985” and “211” — the state’s labels for its favoured universities — printed in the requirements column.
Put those two sentences side by side and you get the absurdest spot in the whole picture: the work keeps getting lighter while the bar keeps getting higher. Where did the gap between them go? It was not eaten by technology. It was eaten by how many of us there are. I ran that account in the section “Too many of us, and so worth nothing”; here I add one line — the paper is worth less precisely because everybody is fighting to own more of it.
I do not want to re-run the AI argument, I ran it in April. I will only take the part visible from my own chair: the work got lighter, the crowd got bigger, the paper got cheaper, and the requirement got higher — and those four are one event. As for the sentence “copywriters, programmers and customer service have all been replaced”, I have no figure for it and I will not sign it. What I sign is this: those posts each used to hold a craft, and now they hold a process.
The hardest line is this: I can watch it being shaved down and still not see where to push. The positions above me were never bought with one more certificate; they are bought with resources and with connections. The positions below me always have a longer queue than I do. So when somebody tells me to seize the windfall, I assume the next slide is a course he is selling.
I took a side gig, worked a few days, and he settled 300 yuan for it
A while back I took a side job. It came through somebody I know: a boss who wanted an app, understood nothing of the technology, and had hired an outside outsourcing team to build it. My role, put politely, was technical consultant; put honestly, I was the one who had to accept that team’s work on his behalf.
My opening price was 6,000 yuan a month, with a promise attached: I would deliver the launch integration at the 18,000 tier. He would not take it. The early stage, he said, is only some simple testing — 4,000 a month. I never wanted the job. It came through an acquaintance, so I thought: try a few days, then see.
After a few days I could see the shape of that “simple testing”.
- I was being used as a junior QA. Several install packages land in a single day, and every one has to be re-run from the beginning.
- Side-gig pay, full-time load. Tasks came in from morning till night — I got up at six to run a round before work and ran another one after I got home.
- That works out to a few dozen yuan an hour. I will not prettify the number: for the same hours I would earn more driving for a ride-hailing app, or doing designated driving.
- More was queued up behind it: write a crawler, pull news, pull videos.
One small thing shows where the problem actually sits. The first time I opened the app, that video filling the whole screen started playing with the sound on. I suggested it should be muted by default, because otherwise the experience is indefensible. The outsourcer answered me with one line: the boss asked for it. The app itself looks like it came from another decade; it cost, I was told, 200,000 yuan.
In this job the AI really did lift throughput — but the throughput it lifted did not become my hourly rate. It became his volume. Versions I could not finish tapping through in a night can be tapped through by a script now. What is still mine is the write-up: the cause, the screenshot, the reproduction path, the actual result and the expected result, every field of it. The script was written by AI, and when it tests the wrong thing it is still my time spent debugging and rewriting. Bugs were found, and I knew they were not all found — and “not all of them” is the phrase that gets charged to me if something ships broken.
The team he had hired did not test much of what it wrote; very basic bugs were simply lying there. I pushed them to the outsourcer in charge and the reasons came back in a queue: first that I could not just throw a PDF at him, then that he questioned me — “is this really how you used to raise issues with developers?” I never did QA a day in my life. For fifteen years I wrote things a machine reads; here I was explaining, to a man who would not take it, that nothing happens when you press this button.
To be fair, this boss is genuinely impressive: two months, no technical skill of his own, a small team assembled, a few people hired to run a cross-border business — and he got it off the ground. I am not going to be sour about that. A wage was never going to be the road; you have to go for it, and you have to have the nerve. Today I concede that sentence.
But I stopped after a few days. I told the contact straight out today: I am not doing this, not at any price. He settled me 300 yuan.
Those two sentences are not a contradiction. I am only putting each of them back where it belongs: his road was taken by grabbing it; my ledger I do the arithmetic on. A man carrying a thirty-year mortgage, a child at school, and a lawsuit for his wife’s unpaid wages still working its way through the courts — I have no ticket for “take the risk”. My cost of being wrong once is next month’s mortgage payment; his is money he can afford to lose.
So I would not take this job back even with more money on it. It is not about the money: it is that I could not see one thing in it that I could carry away. Pure attrition, pure draft-horse work. The first reason I gave myself was that I had no time — and that reason is true, only it is a line in the ledger, not a grievance.
I am not going to tell you to start a side hustle
At this point a normal essay would start handing out advice: take a side job, invest, build a personal brand. I won’t. That is the same trade in new packaging, selling you the same risk again. A person who cannot work out their own overtime pay will not gain a second cash flow by installing one more app.
I am not against the side hustle as a theory. I tried the answer the section above describes: a few days of work, settled at 300 yuan.
I have only three things I actually do:
- Retire the debt first. Debt is a rigid expense wired to a fluctuating income. When my severance arrived I put it into the mortgage — not because I calculate well, but because I know next month’s number will not look good. The monthly payment never asks whether you still have a salary.
- Keep the craft in your body, not in the process. Only one thing is portable: whether people come to you when they hit something hard. Grade, title and badge convert into nothing.
- Recognise the professional nitpicker early, and do not wait for him to decide your future. I wrote that in the last essay and I have to write it again. Because most people only see the seat clearly after it has already decided about them.
Last line
The work is harder now. This is not a cycle. It is a redistribution of responsibility: the firm moved onto wage workers the part of the risk it was supposed to carry itself, and after moving it, they call that optimisation. Optimisation my foot.
The only thing I can do is slacken those three ropes a little — in money, in judgement, in time.
What fifteen years taught me is not “work hard and it pays”. It is the opposite: effort is only an entry ticket. It does not allocate a seat. Seats are allocated by other people, and the one regularity I have seen in that allocation is this —
Nobody remembers that you gave them fifteen years. They only look at what you cost this year, and whether you will still be here next month.
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