Dalian Workers

  Dalian, China
Monday, October 1, 2007

The Chinese workforce is an impressive thing.  There are 5 times as many people as the US to feed, clothe, move and entertain in China, and 5 times as many jobs to make that happen.  All activity seems to be geared to the proper level to make those numbers balance.  For example, there are no street sweeper trucks in Dalian because every block has a person in a green/orange uniform who sweeps gutters all day long.  There is a storefront near my office where several of the green/orange uniformed public employees make brooms for the street sweepers out of reeds that are delivered whenever the pile gets low.  They also make the waste basket sweepers from recycled nylon cloth, reeds and wire.  They use the sidewalk for their workshop, and it's shared with the guy who repairs the bike pickups for the maintenance department.  Right next door to a noodle shop.
 
The street sweepers do a great job. Dalian public streets are as clean as any American city and much more so than say New York or Chicago, cities of comparable size.  In addition to the public sweepers, it looks like the larger businesses also have their own private sweepers with unique uniforms, but usually the same brooms and baskets.
 
China has a great advantage for people service businesses like restaurants and hotels. Dalian has 5 five star hotels, and probably 20 four star hotels.  The workforce is geared for service.

Shucking Shellfish

The picture of guys in chef's uniforms shucking shellfish is typical.  This is a restaurant with maybe 200 seats, and they have 15 guys cleaning the shellfish, all in uniforms.  Of course, it takes 15 guys to clean up this seafood. 
 
At restaurants, if there are more than 4 people at the table, it's not uncommon for the table to have its own server.  When 8 or 10 people eat together, they have a person who just stands and waits for your every need, often another greeter who hangs around most of the meal chatting with the regular guests, then an army of servers, maybe 6 or 8 in rotation, who deliver food throughout the event, one bowl at a time.  The picture of the 8 people with lime green vests shows the staff of a restaurant as they prepare for their evening shift.  It sounds like they get a pep talk, reminders about the customers and their manners.  This takes place every shift for many restaurants larger than the family run affairs.  It is also common for larger retail stores, security guards, even parking attendants. 
 
Retail is another experience.  There are Department Stores, all of which have greeters at the doors and attendants in each section.  When you stop to look at something, it is common for 3 or 4 salespeople to gather around and start convincing you that whatever you are looking at would be just right for you.  If you are browsing, they often will pull stuff off the rack that they think you might like and present it to you with a "henhao!" - "very good!".  For some reason, they always pull out the equivalent of a liesure suit for me.  I need a new haircut.
 
Speaking of which, my $7 haircut included 2 shampoos, before and after, 3 attendants and a head massage.  It's the best haircut I've ever had.  Another advantage of this labor force is that craftsmanship is high for all manual tasks.  The result is that haircuts, which are inexpensive, are also high quality and available in a variety only limited by the cutee's tolerance.  So China is a 3rd world economy where everyone sports a $200 haricut.  People look good in Dalian - excellent grooming along with trendy clothes and the fact that they are trim and healthy.  This population is definitely upscale.
 
Most retail is done in shops not larger than 10'x10', often half that size, each with its own salespeson, sometimes more than 1.  The best (well, at least the most entertaining) food and clothing markets are massive operations, each with booths (in buildings) or areas (on sidewalks or parking lots) that are just big enough for the merchandise and an attendant - usually an older person for food and a young person for clothes.  Many fruit/vegetable vendors simply roll out a sheet and set the produce on the ground or prop it up on a few boards. Booths are typically separated by a 4 foot walkway, difficult for 2 people to pass and often filled with 3 or 4.  People on 3' centers every direction. 
 
The market that calls itself the largest in Dalian is probably 500 food vendors - meat. seafood, fruits, vegeetables - and another 500 vendors in the 5 story adjacent building selling clothes, shoes, housegoods, fabrics and electronics.  It's on a block that's probably 600 feet long and 300 feet deep with almost no mechanized assistance.  Who needs refrigeration when the chicken and butcher are waiting for you?  It looks like one trick for the beef and pork is to freeze it the night before, then send it into town with a butcher who can whack it as the customer likes.  Everything is delivered into the market and taken out  by hand.  Even on the street, a large portion of the goods are delivered on bike, or handcarts, or motorbikes, with trucks as a last resort.  It's a dramatic example of why China uses only 10% of the energy per capita that the US uses, although Dalian is surely at the top of China's scale. 

Their infrastructure for food and staples is minimal, transport is optimized for human delivery, and manpower substitutes for refrigeration, security, handling and processing.  This particular market, like almost every activity in public, is cleaned up daily, by hand, with the same brooms the street sweepers use.  For the food areas, sales are usually over by about noon and by 2 PM, the place is cleaned and swept, ready for tomorrow.  Another day of food and clothing for downtown Dalian's 1 million people.  I'd guess that there might be 20,000 people in this market on any given morning, maybe 50,000 throughout the day, probably more than half of them vendors or commercial buyers.

The construction industry is less formal than I'm used to.  No OSHA, of course, though there are safety rules for workers, much softer than the US and probably not enforced as strictly. 

Window Washers

Check out the picture of the window washers.  These guys are probably 10 stories up sitting on a board, carrying their bucket with them.  Workers wear hard hats on the larger projects, but very little safety gear, no fall protection, hardly any barriers.  I saw a 4' deep hole, maybe 8' by 4', in a public street today that had a few 5 gallon buckets around it.  Last week I saw a guy welding without eye protection! 
 
With the labor advantage, construction is a different industry.  You'd never see a nail gun here, for example.  It's not a matter of speed because rather than invest in expensive machines that use more energy to increase production, just hire 2 or 3 more nailers.  And you certainly would not hear the nailers complain that it would be easier with a nail gun because 3 guys would have their job before they finished whining.  The job gets done in the same time with more employment and fewer resources.  I've seen dozens of ditch diggers, but only one backhoe, and that was still on the flatbed just passing through.  The most extreme example I've seen was a carpenter sawing boards with 2 other guys acting as sawhorses.  That can't be right.
 

Buildng Renovation

Another picture shows a crew cleaning the outside of a building.  This happens to be one of the historic buildings, built by the Japanese in the early 20th century.  No manlifts here, not even hoses.  Just sling a rope over the roof, tie a knot on the end and you're washing, with your own bucket and brush.  Notice a couple of the guys are wearing flip flops. For better traction.
 

Subcontractor Union Hall

Subcontactors are also interesting.  One of the pictures shows a street corner where the plumbers, electricians, painters, concrete workers and other laborers hang out.  This is one of the medium sized employment centers.  The larger centers have billboards with job postings and several hundred workers hanging out.  As you can see, many of the skilled trades sit on the curb with their tools on display, ready for a customer to show up and give them something to do.  Once every few minutes, a truck pulls up (or maybe a bike or motorcycle), loads up 2,3,5 or a dozen workers and off they go to the jobsite.
 
Another picture shows the shipyad in the background with a bridge in the foreground.  You can see the parade of workers walking across the bridge, snaking through the streets, more of the parade between the 2 water towers, and they end up at the large cream colored arch buildings at the shipyard above.  This is a morning photo about 7 AM.  The parade reverses in the afternoon.  Worker housing and buses are near the bridge.  No parking lot congestion at this site.  
 

Bike chef with Octopus

Finally, the mobile food industry.  Everywhere you look in the downtown area, there are people selling food off the back of bicycles.  The simplest of these are fresh fruit and vegetable vendors selling off of a bed on the back of the bike.   The more sophisticated have whole portable kitchens.  Propane tanks and cook top grilles where they fry up almost anything edible.  Octopus is popular.  The photo shows a guy frying up  some of these delicacies. That's a concrete trowel he is using to squish the food onto the grille.  I guess it brings out the flavor.  I used the same tool to finish my patio.  Kabobs are also very popular from these vendors - everything fried on a stick from celery and veggies wrapped in a tortilla to liver, chicken feet, squid, pork, eggs, and all kinds of fish.  You can smell these a block away, especially the octopus, which would be a good stink bomb in its own right.