After running a garment factory in Kangyue Village for 20 years, Liu Changxin is most proud of retaining 13 permanent workers in the factory. They have been with Liu Changxin for more than ten years.
In the evening of late April in Kangle Village, Guangzhou, Liu Changxin sat on a pony with his chest held in his chest. The small blackboard in front of him still had traces of rain, and it read: “Sincerity.” Looking for customers, OEM jeans, long-term cooperation.” This line of chalk writing was written after the epidemic last year, and it has faded a bit now.
People who were also looking for clients sat next to him, lining up along the Connaught Bridge to the west. Some were holding cardboard and wearing sample clothes, but most of them were ignored.
Photo by Zhu Haoyu, a person recruiting workers and looking for customers in Kangyue Village
“It is normal not to receive orders all day long.” Liu Changxin We have been operating a garment factory in Guangzhou for nearly 20 years. Last year, the epidemic effect was the worst, and this year it may be the second to last. In his impression, in Kangle Village, there were people sleeping in the dormitories 24 hours a day, people working 24 hours a day in the factory, and people placing orders 24 hours a day on the street. But that was no longer the case.
1 The Myth of “Ten Thousand Yuan Monthly Salary”
The most lively place in Kangle Village is in Kangle around the bridge. Next to a milk tea shop in Qiaotou, more than a dozen people gathered together, some squatting and some standing smoking and chatting. They were all workers looking for work. They lamented that their work was not cost-effective and planned to wait until the evening for the factory director to arrive. Recruit odd jobs at high prices.
On the west side of Kangle Bridge on the afternoon of April 3, workers and job recruiters gathered by Zhu Haoyu/Photographed by Zhu Haoyu
” I won’t work for 7,000 yuan a month. It’s not even money.” Bai De squatted next to his coworkers and said like a talk show actor, “The goal is to earn a monthly salary of over 10,000 yuan!” Born in 1987, he was barely a big deal among his coworkers. It’s not small, but between the hair on the back of the head, the scalp has directly seen the light.
Five years ago, he came to Guangzhou from rural Hubei to work. He was already familiar with the recruitment routine of Kangle Village: generally, the later the job is, the higher the wages will be. People are recruiting workers from 11 pm until three or four in the morning. “Those who really want to make money have to stay up all night.” During the day, the boss looks for long-term workers and pays them a monthly salary of about 7,000. In the middle of the night, the boss has urgent shipment orders that cannot be completed. He usually pays 35 yuan an hour. The workers work until eight or nine in the morning and go to bed, and go to bed at two or three in the afternoon. Wake up and come out to find a job.
In the dormitory, the workers laughed at themselves, saying that the people who work here are all “Shenzhen Sanhe masters”, “If one person works, the whole family has no worries”, if they are short of money, they will work, if they are tired, they will Play games while sleeping. In Bai De’s words, “Now that the market is not good and orders are unstable, long-term workers can earn money as quickly as part-time workers.” At this time, he was lying naked on the bed, wrapping his lower bunk with sheets.
There is a pile of playing cards scattered on the common table in the dormitory, and the corners of some cards have been turned up. After returning to Hong Kong Village after the epidemic was lifted last year, Bai De and his roommates drank and played double games in their free time. At the end of the fight, he would always joke half drunk and half awake: “Whoever loses should go back to Hubei.” But until May of this year, no one left Bird’s dormitory. “I won’t leave even if I make more or less money. I still have one thought of staying here.” Bai De said.
At nine o’clock in the evening, the streets of Hong Kong Village were packed with people. Bai De walked to the Kang Le Bridge and took a white short-sleeved shirt from Liu Changxin’s hand. He twisted the collar with one hand and twisted the edge with the other hand. This is a sample garment that has completed the “four threads”. Liu Changxin is hiring people to sew and hem the garment, as well as thread trimmers, cutting machines, welders and parking spaces.
“How much does one piece cost? How much do you make?” Bai De asked.
“200 pieces, no defective products, 5 yuan per piece, shipped before four o’clock tomorrow morning.” Liu Changxin replied.
“Is it 6 yuan?” Bird stretched out the short sleeves.
“Let’s go.” Liu Changxin hesitated for two seconds.
Liu Changxin’s factory is about 200 meters east of Kangle Bridge. There are 13 workers in two rooms of less than 100 square meters on the fourth floor of a building facing the street. Bird sat down in front of the machine, picked up a piece of fabric from the ground and started rolling the “four threads”. He fed the fabric in along the bayonet of the track. He stepped on the pedal and heard the clicking sounds of the machine and the sound of the second hand turning. With.
Determine the shoulders, cut the collar, and sew the front and back pieces of the garment. It takes about 2 minutes for Baird to complete one piece. “Time is a bit tight”, but Bird did not give up again. According to the requirements, he had to work at the work station for more than 6 hours continuously before he could finish the goods before 4 o’clock and earn 1,200 yuan.
Bard works at the work station/photographed by Zhu Haoyu
From recruitment, bargaining to trial production, the whole process takes half an hour Less than. “He is quite experienced, which is rare.” Liu Changxin said, putting the small blackboard at the door of the workshop and going to the cubicle to see if there were any quality problems in the ready-made garments.
Having run a garment factory in Kangyue Village for 20 years, Liu Changxin is most proud of retaining 13 permanent workers in the factory. They have been with Liu Changxin for more than ten years. . Only when the order volume is large and the goods need to be shipped within 24 hours, Liu Changxin will recruit part-time workers to supplement the manpower.
But Liu Changxin actually doesn’t like recruiting zeroes.Many tourists from out of town go to Shangxiajiu. “Some bulk goods from the 13th line are sold there, for ten or twenty yuan a piece.”
Most practitioners in the garment industry in Kangyue Village are like Liu Changxin. Although they don’t know the “good things” about Guangzhou, they want to work hard to stay. Liu Changxin’s friend Lin An, like him, came to Kangle Village to open a garment factory in 2002. Around 2017, Lin An felt as if he had reached a bottleneck period, and the epidemic in 2020 made him almost no money. He printed many red transfer advertisements in his own office, but in the end he gritted his teeth and did not post them. At a party at the end of April, Lin An discovered that Liu Changxin, like himself, had printed transfer advertisements at the end of the year, but stopped posting them this year.
Most of Liu Changxin’s memories of this city are related to garment making, but he still said that Guangzhou is his favorite.
“I want to stay in Guangzhou, but the reality is cruel, it will send me back to Hubei.”
Say it , Liu Changxin lit up another thin cigarette.
(At the request of the interviewee, Liu Changxin and Bai De are pseudonyms)</p
