Q: Why can’t factories find workers these days?
1. The Real Labor Shortage:
Even with a standard 40-hour work week, legal overtime pay, standard social benefits, no overnight shifts, and no age discrimination, they still can't find anyone.
The Fake Labor Shortage:
Working 10–12 hours a day, 28 days a month, on a two-shift rotation including overnights. Overtime is paid at the bare minimum rate with zero subsidies. Some offer basic insurance, but most skip the housing fund. On top of that, they only want men under 30 who can handle the graveyard shift.
Then they start screaming: "Why aren't any young people applying for jobs?!"
2. A friend of mine, her husband’s family owns a factory in a small town in Zhejiang. I won't specify the industry.
A couple of years ago, I was having dinner with her husband, and he started complaining: "It’s so hard to find workers these days. You have to offer at least 4,000 yuan a month just to get someone in the door. That’s 800 yuan more than a few years ago. With over 200 employees, think about how much extra money that is every year..."
Based on that, you’d think he was running a small factory barely staying afloat, right?
Well, let me tell you: his family drives a Rolls-Royce, owns multiple properties in Hangzhou, and lived in the UK for six or seven years. When his wife was still in school, she was already driving an Audi, living in a luxury penthouse, and buying designer bags like they were groceries.
For a wealthy business family like that, "hiring difficulties" must be a real headache, huh?
But for the rest of us commoners — if things are a little harder for them, doesn't that make life a little easier for you?
Don't be the kind of person who does proletarian labor while worrying about a capitalist’s profit margins. Keep grinding, wage slaves!
3. Here’s a ridiculous one for you.
Back when I was a supervisor in a Suzhou factory, we were losing staff left and right. Management told the boss: "Pay is too low, the work is too hard; we need to give them a raise."
The boss’s response? He rejected the raise and used that money to bring in Living Buddhas from Tibet to perform an exorcism/ritual at the front gate to fix the "bad vibes."
4. The so-called "labor shortage" is a hoax. The real problem is an unwillingness to improve pay or benefits, and a refusal to treat workers with basic human dignity.
Ten years ago, when I first started working in factories in the Pearl River Delta, many places would openly blacklist people from provinces like Henan, Guizhou, and Guangxi. You couldn’t get a job through official channels; you had to pay a middleman just to get in. That’s how arrogant they were back then.
Factories will always push workers to their physical limits without raising wages. If one "star" worker can do 4,000 pieces a day while everyone else does 3,000, the factory will inevitably cut the unit price. In the end, everyone is forced to do 5,000 pieces just to make less than they did for 4,000. People like that usually end up being hated by the entire workshop.
On an hourly assembly line, you can only imagine how fast they crank up the "engine." It’s exactly like Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.
In many factories, even going to the bathroom requires a formal report and an "off-post permit." You have to pass through security and wait in line just to use the toilet.
You often see short videos claiming factories are struggling to find people for 10,000 RMB a month, but once they bait you into going there — like those small shops in the Haizhu District of Guangzhou — you realize it was all a lie.
Finally, a word of advice to young people: avoid the factory life if you can. Unless you are in a critical technical role, you’ll eventually be replaced by a robot. When that day comes and you’re unemployed, you’ll realize that after years in a factory, you don’t have any other skills to fall back on.
5. I used to work for a top-tier industry leader in China.
I saw with my own eyes over 500 workers arrive at the dorms with their families to start their jobs. Three days later, fewer than 150 remained on the roster. These people brought their entire families, thinking a "big factory" would provide stable income. Instead, driven by insane workloads and the arrogant, abrasive attitudes of low-level supervisors, they fled in the middle of the night. In this place, a worker with three months of experience is considered a "veteran," because 99% of people don't stay.
I saw with my own eyes elite graduates from 985 and 211 universities — hired as engineers — being "dispatched" to the assembly line to "learn" because the factory was short on manual labor. They worked 12-hour night shifts, and excluding meal times, spent 10 hours doing grueling mechanized labor — lifting boxes — six days a week for a month straight. And yet, this is a company that constantly brags about its "Smart Manufacturing."
I saw with my own eyes the leadership remove every single chair in the workshop just because "supervisors sometimes get lazy." Every worker was forced to stand for the full 12-hour shift; no squatting, no sitting allowed. The elite graduates were treated the same way. When I massaged my calves and asked "veteran" workers (with only a few months of seniority) if it hurt, they simply said, "Whose legs don't hurt? You just get used to it."
I saw with my own eyes the shoe cabinets outside the "cleanroom." You could see the dust and particles with the naked eye, and the stench was overwhelming. Yet, the leadership wouldn't even spend money on an exhaust fan, not that they ever bothered to walk down there themselves. Shoes and hats were recycled and reused; the "cleanliness" of the cleanroom was a joke.
Out of 30 fresh graduates dispatched there, two developed acute respiratory infections and over a dozen got athlete's foot. This "assignment" triggered a wave of mass resignations among the engineers; that batch of graduates currently has an 80% turnover rate.
I saw with my own eyes that the maximum allowed time for a "leave of absence" (break) within the workshop was 15 minutes — but it took 10 minutes just to walk to the exit. The water fountain was outside, so workers barely got a sip of water all night.
And since the fountain was less than five meters from the stinking shoe cabinets, I refused to drink from it unless my throat was literally parched.
I saw with my own eyes a worker lose an entire night’s wages just for breaking a single pane of glass. Meanwhile, the red banners outside the dorms screamed: "Roll up your sleeves and work hard; 10,000 RMB a month is within your reach."
When labor is scarce, they squeeze every drop out of you; when labor is plenty, they calculate how to lay you off. In the end, when they have enough people, everyone works at 120% capacity; when they don't, people quit in droves. A department that once had 30 people running themselves ragged now has only six people left, just lying flat to get through the day.
Why can’t they find workers? Because the people who make money sitting down don't treat the people who work standing up like human beings.
PS The ultimate irony: while the factory’s reputation is so toxic that they can’t even hire locals, the company somehow wins a "Best Employer" award every single year.
Beyond the fact that workers aren't treated like human beings, there is another critical factor: the total collapse of trust in the labor market. From recruitment and onboarding to the actual work and final payment, every single step is a cycle of deception and oppression.
There are no effective legal channels to protect workers' rights. We see so many stories of workers failing to get their hard-earned money despite appeals. Since working as an HR recruiter, I’ve realized the truth: this is tacitly permitted. An "industrial powerhouse" needs a constant supply of "disposable consumables," doesn't it?
First, my experience as a worker:
Last year, I was suddenly laid off. My savings were running out, and no one would hire me, not even milk tea shops, which only wanted people under 26 (I was 27). Unable to pay rent and too proud to ask my family for money, I decided to "give up my white-collar pride" and head to a factory to get by.
The ad said the factory was in Guangzhou. Only after I got off the bus did I realize I’d been hauled away to Huizhou. I was stunned, but if I’d left then, I would have wasted the travel fare without earning a cent. I gritted my teeth and stayed. Because I’d been lied to, I had no luggage, so I had to buy a quilt, a mattress, and toiletries on-site.
(This is why there are so many vendors outside factories; they profit off people who were lured there by lies and have no choice but to stay and work.)
The supervisor saw I was a girl with "delicate" skin and assigned me to the "easiest" group. We cleaned phone screen glass by hand, slotting them into racks to be dipped in chemical solvents. It sounds easy, right? It was the easiest job there, yet it nearly killed me.
The Physical Toll: 12-hour shifts on a two-shift rotation. One hour for lunch. Standing the entire time — no chairs allowed.
The Environment: Non-stop, deafening noise. Even with earplugs, my head would buzz for hours after leaving.
The Damage: The cleaning chemicals were incredibly corrosive. The glass coming out of the high-temp wash was scalding. I tried wearing my own gloves, but the supervisor screamed at me, saying gloves would scratch the "precision instruments." After 14 days, my hands were literally rotting despite constant applications of hand cream.
The Sensory Deprivation: No phones allowed — they claim it’s for "trade secrets." Once you enter that workshop, you are cut off from the world for 12 hours. You lose all sense of time. I worked the night shift; every morning when I walked out and saw the rising sun, I felt like I was burning out, like my body was melting in the light. It was a dual agony of body and soul.
Before I went in, I was confident: "It's just standing, I can handle it. It's just 12 hours without a phone, I can entertain myself." You don't know the pain until you've lived it. Add to that the verbal abuse from supervisors and the vulgar, passive-aggressive environment from other workers. As someone who used to sit in an office, I had never seen anything like it. It was impossible to communicate with them on a human level.
After 14 days — which felt like a lifetime — I was paid 1,860 RMB. That’s roughly 132 RMB a day, or less than 12 RMB per hour. When I demanded to know why the promised rate of 19 RMB/hour wasn't met, they claimed I was "too slow," my "productivity was too low," and because I didn't stay a full month, they were entitled to dock my pay to the 12 RMB rate. I have never felt so cheap in my life.
Then, my experience as an HR:
In July, after leaving a foreign trade company, I took an HR job, not realizing it was for a factory. That’s when I truly understood why they can’t find workers.
Factory recruiters shouldn't be called "Human Resources." They are human trafficking cartels with a corporate veneer. The hourly rates in the ads are fake. The locations are fake. The photos of the work environment are fake.
Applicants usually want a job near home. They ask the HR if the factory is local, and the HR says yes just to get them there. In reality, the buses are already scheduled for specific factories.
Everyone who shows up that day gets herded onto a bus and sent to one location, regardless of what city they wanted. People realize they've been conned once they arrive, but like I was, they are often at the end of their rope and just "accept their fate." It’s an entire predatory industry chain: physical exam fees, bus fares, selling daily necessities.
I asked my colleagues, "Won't we get in trouble for lying like this?" The boss slammed the table and said, "Every factory does this. If you don't lie, you won't find anyone."
I stayed for one month. I recruited 15 people and made 12,000 RMB (5,000 base + 500 per head). The office felt like a trafficking ring — counting "heads" on buses and learning mental manipulation scripts to manipulate workers into staying when they tried to quit.
Even though I tried to be honest with my recruits, my conscience couldn't take it, so I resigned. (I guess that’s why I’ll never be rich.)
This company has existed for ten years, has over a hundred employees, and is a "high-income taxpayer."
So, why can’t factories find workers?
The answer is obvious. If capitalists would rather "dump milk" than share wealth, and if recruiters act like outlaws beyond the reach of labor laws, then the best thing workers can do is "waste" their labor by staying away.
The reputation of an "Industrial Powerhouse" should not be built upon the marrow and blood of its workers.
