Workers in difficult situations all have a dream of quitting their jobs

From the hot search about Baidu's vice president breaking up with an employee to the phenomenon of declining workplace income revealed by "2024 Spring Recruitment High-Paying Careers and Talent Insights", all of them reflect the anxiety and uneasiness of people in the workplace. Next, let's walk into the world of workers, listen to their voices, and explore their stories of struggle and struggle in the workplace.

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the workplace.

In May, the topic "Baidu's Vice President and Employee Break Up and Resign, I Approved Immediately" became a hot search, causing a large number of workers to be indignant on social platforms. Subsequently, "2024 Spring Recruitment High-Paying Careers and Talent Insights" showed that in the first quarter of 2024, as many as 35.87% of workers will have their income reduced.

The two echo each other, both telling the various joys and sorrows of workers in the workplace.

Since 2002, many young people have felt the pressure of work. According to data, nearly 40% of people faced layoffs that year, and 40.9% of laid-off workers spent more than two months looking for a job. Among the factors that job seekers pay the most attention to, the weight of "salary and benefits" has decreased, the weight of "personal development" has increased, and "business prospects" has begun to enter the top three keywords in the workplace.

There are also more and more workplace topics on platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin. The 2023 Douyin Annual Observation Report shows that among the video views of various knowledge categories on Douyin, workplace topics ranked eighth. Young people share interview experiences, teach reporting skills, complain about weird colleagues, comment on abnormal bosses, and exchange sideline experiences on the Internet...

In short, this is an era where you can neither lie down nor roll up, so young people living in the workplace began to complain and seek gold everywhere.

1. Fed up with the boss’s empty promises, I want to use the gift money to open a nail salon

Wang Hui｜26 years old, sales assistant at an Internet company

After May Day, Wang Hui's company gave all employees a real Labor Day "gift". In order to cope with the economic situation and market competition, the company decided to advance the working time by 20 minutes from 9:00 to 8:40, and the leaving time remained unchanged.

This small Internet company was Wang Hui's third job after graduation.

Image source: interviewee

She was unlucky. After graduation, she joined a pretty good tutoring institution, which offered good pay in a new first-tier city, and most importantly, provided food and accommodation.

Unfortunately, the good times did not last long. Before Wang Hui could show her talents, the entire education and training industry was swept into the tide of the times.

Wang Hui's second job was at a well-known new consumer company. One year after joining, the new consumer company was in a state of mourning. Wang Hui was not only dismissed in disguise, but she did not even receive compensation. She discussed with several colleagues and decided to fight the company to the end, but after more than a year of litigation, she only received a settlement of 10,000 yuan.

This ten thousand dollars is not enough to cover her lawyer fees.

Five years after graduation, I changed to my third job. When Wang Hui first joined this Internet company, she was deeply aware of the fast pace of "big companies". Although the company with less than 50 people is still a long way from the big companies, the boss admires Jack Ma and yearns for Huawei. He has a sense of freedom and a wolf culture.

What Wang Hui couldn't understand the most was that they had to hold a morning meeting every week. The content of the morning meeting had nothing to do with work. The boss would lead them to study the "famous works" of past dynasties, including "Tao Te Ching", "The Analects", "The Great Learning" and "The Doctrine of the Mean", and they had to write their reflections and take turns to give PPT presentations every week. Last week, Wang Hui heard a new term from her boss: the law of increasing entropy.

"The previous generation at least got a living when they worked, but now we rely on chicken soup and metaphysics to motivate us," Wang Hui said helplessly. The time adjustment after May Day was the last straw that broke the camel's back for Wang Hui. They originally had a single day off system, and they had to take turns cleaning. The lunch break and meal break were only an hour and a half. Now, even the twenty minutes in the morning were robbed.

After the beginning of the year, Wang Hui’s “slacking partner” resigned.

Wang Hui has considered changing jobs, but every time she opens a recruitment website, she immediately dismisses the idea. After all, no one can guarantee that the next job will be better than the current one, especially in the current employment environment where competition is particularly fierce. After all, this year's college graduates are expected to exceed 11.79 million, a new high, and Wang Hui finds it scary to think about looking for a job with so many graduates.

Therefore, her own plan is that even if she wants to resign in the future, she can only try to start a business and can no longer waste time on job hunting.

Over the years, more and more people have left the traditional workplace and given up the seemingly glamorous white-collar life to set up stalls, do takeout, open shops... After the local night market was reopened, Wang Hui's friends began to set up stalls one after another. She was also slightly tempted, but she still hoped to open a nail salon after resigning.

Until now, Wang Hui's nail salon has not taken the next step. The reason is very simple, it is still stuck in raising venture capital.

After working for so many years, she still hasn't saved enough money to open a nail salon. When she thinks of this, Wang Hui hopes to leave the workplace sooner.

So she set her sights on her own dowry.

Twenty-six-year-old Wang Hui originally planned to get engaged this year and get married next year.

According to the rules of her hometown, she asked her boyfriend's family for a betrothal gift of 100,000 yuan. Her boyfriend didn't object at first, but as the house was renovated and the mortgage was paid, the 100,000 yuan seemed a bit "heavy". During the May Day holiday, her boyfriend's family tried to reduce the 100,000 yuan to 60,000 yuan, and Wang Hui had a big fight with her boyfriend.

The boyfriend was very firm in his attitude. He said 100,000 yuan was fine, but she had to bear the extra debt. Wang Hui was angry, but her best friend poured cold water on her and "comforted" her: "Think about it, even if he gave it to you, 100,000 yuan to open a nail salon is probably not enough to make a living."

I have to admit that this is the truth. The rent, labor, and raw materials of a nail salon are all very expensive. There are countless schools of all sizes in Wang Hui's city, and her original goal was to open a nail salon near the university town.

However, the annual rent for a cubicle of a few square meters in any underground shopping mall is at least 50,000 yuan.

The reason for choosing this place is that it is close to the university town and has no problem with traffic. But the disadvantages are also obvious. The street in the university town is full of nail salons, and the competition will be very fierce. We also have to consider the winter and summer vacations within a year. Once the store is opened, there will be a cumulative window period of up to two months every year.

Data from Qichacha shows that there are currently more than 1.21 million nail-related companies operating normally in my country, including more than 300,000 street nail salons, with a closure rate as high as 31%.

Wang Hui’s nail salon eventually closed down before it even opened, and she could only continue to work with peace of mind.

2. If you major in architecture, what are your chances of switching careers to sell fast food?

Li Xiang｜28 years old, architectural designer at the Design Institute

Recently, Li Xiang gave birth to a daughter. But the arrival of the newborn did not make the young couple happy at all. Instead, they were anxious, stressed, insomniac, and even quarreled. Because they used to have a good job, but now it is a luxury to receive a monthly salary.

In 2024, the entire construction industry still shows no signs of waking up.

Li Xiang's company has not paid their salaries on time for two years. They are only paid a basic salary twice a year, during the Mid-Autumn Festival and the Chinese New Year. The performance bonus for 2023 has been delayed until now, and now that the new year is halfway through, there is still no movement. How bad is the construction market?

It is reported that in the city where Li Xiang is located, there were once many Didi drivers and food delivery boys who were his colleagues.

In the past two years, the construction industry has gradually changed from a stable, popular and high-paying job to a "pitfall" job that countless young people avoid. According to a survey, the turnover rate of employees in the construction industry is 22%, among which the highest turnover rates are for construction site technicians and architects, at 30% and 25% respectively.

If they didn't have a child, Li Xiang could have survived for a while longer. But since his wife became pregnant, financial problems have always surrounded the two young people, and even gradually evolved into a major family conflict. His wife is a doctor in a county hospital and her income is not small, but with the mortgage, living expenses, and raising a child, one person's salary is in danger of not being able to support them.

In the early stages of pregnancy, his wife planned to find a confinement center to spend the first month after giving birth safely. However, in third-tier cities, the cheapest confinement center costs 20,000 yuan. Considering Li Xiang's current financial situation, he was reluctant to spend the 20,000 yuan. The confinement center was like a fuse that ignited the relationship between the couple.

During the confinement period, you have to spend money everywhere.

Milk powder, diapers, and various nursing expenses have drained Li Xiang's already small "balance". Even the 2,000 yuan beauty card that his wife wanted to top up has to be saved for their daughter's food.

A month later, his wife took the baby back to her parents' home in the south, leaving Li Xiang alone to think about his future life.

Li Xiang does have a side job. In his spare time, he would take on some private design work from the client. However, this side job still cannot get out of the current vicious circle of the construction industry. Sometimes, the design fee has not been paid for half a year after the drawings were handed over to the client.

In the final analysis, the industry has less and less "surplus" at the source.

At the beginning of the year, Li Xiang had already thought about leaving his job. His father-in-law and his family were in the fruit business in the south, and he had originally planned to open a fruit store. But his father-in-law, who was in the business, did not support it. Today's fruit market has shifted from offline to online on a large scale. It is not enough to just do offline business. It is necessary to transform online at the same time, but Li Xiang knows nothing about online live streaming.

Various live broadcasts, group purchases, community group purchases, e-commerce activities to help farmers... are making life increasingly difficult for physical fruit channels. His father-in-law believes that without online operations, physical stores will have no future.

Take Douyin as an example. On the Douyin e-commerce platform, the market share of the fresh fruit and vegetable industry increased by 150.07% year-on-year in 2022, which is much higher than the overall growth rate of Douyin e-commerce itself. This strongly shows that online sales have become a general trend.

According to relevant data from a fruit chain store with more than 1,000 stores, since the launch of online video creation and live broadcast in 2023, the online live broadcast sales alone have accounted for 70% of the total sales. Even if offline sales still account for 30%, after considering multiple costs such as rent, water, electricity, transportation, labor, and maintenance, there is not much left.

May is the peak season for cherries. According to Li Xiang's father-in-law, some new shop owners have no experience and rely only on enthusiasm. Their monthly losses on cherries alone are as high as several thousand yuan. If other categories are included, there are many fruit shops that lose tens of thousands of yuan a month.

After his idea of ​​opening a fruit shop failed, Li Xiang wanted to return to his hometown in the county to open a fast food restaurant.

But what are the chances of success in starting a fast food restaurant business?

According to Tianyancha data, the number of catering companies that were deregistered or revoked in the first three months of 2024 was 167,000, 112,000, and 180,000 respectively. In the past two years, the cost of catering entrepreneurship has increased at an alarming rate. According to the 2023 China Catering Annual Report, rent, ingredients, and labor expenses account for 70%-75% of the total cost of businesses, and the growth rates of the three items in 2023 were 3.6%, 4.8%, and 2.4% respectively.

After seeing these numbers, Li Xiang was unsure if he could afford the risk of failure while raising a child. Perhaps, as his colleagues at the hospital said during the farewell dinner, "Is there any industry that is easy to get into these days? If we hang on, maybe we still have hope."

3. Playing the role of a father and a mother in kindergarten during the day, and acting crazy and stupid in the live broadcast room at night

Yuan Bao｜22 years old, private kindergarten teacher

This year on Mother's Day, kindergarten teacher Yuan Bao gave her mother a big red envelope, which was a shame for her sister who never received as much red envelope as her sister. But after her sister Yuan Meng found out, she still sent her a WeChat message: Do what you can. Yuan Bao was not convinced and said back: I made more than a thousand dollars from live streaming a few days ago.

Finally, I want to resign!!!

Yuan Bao had the idea of ​​resigning on the first day she started working. She likes children and is good at art, music, handicrafts and other skills required for kindergarten teachers. When she chose a major, her family chose preschool education based on her personality and expertise. To be honest, this job is very suitable for Yuan Bao.

She is passionate about taking care of children. She is selected as an excellent teacher in every semester of the kindergarten. Some parents even hesitate to change kindergartens because of her good relationship with their children. Even the head teacher thinks she is the most "talented" one among the teachers born in the 2000s.

But even so, Yuan Bao couldn't go on any longer.

The first thing to be affected is wages. The wages of private kindergartens are already low and are often linked to enrollment. Data shows that in 2023, there were 40.93 million children in preschool education, a decrease of 5.345 million from 2022.

It is no exaggeration to say that these two years have been a cold winter for kindergartens.

During the Mid-Autumn Festival last year, Yuan Bao and several colleagues were recruiting students on the roadside. They gave away small toys, but they still failed to recruit many students. More importantly, children nowadays are becoming more and more difficult to teach. What made Yuan Bao most upset was that a child broke his wrist due to playing too much. Perhaps because he was afraid of being punished by his parents, he went back and said that it was Teacher Yuan who beat him.

"I didn't take a nap, so Teacher Yuan beat me."

After hearing the voice message from the parents, the always optimistic Yuan Bao collapsed. She cried in grievance and asked the headmaster to retrieve the surveillance video for the parents. Fortunately, the surveillance video in the kindergarten is online 24 hours a day. In the end, the child admitted that he accidentally fell while sliding on the slide. Yuan Bao was cleared of the "wrong".

The parents also came to apologize.

However, this incident indirectly intensified Yuan Bao's determination to resign. But what would she do after resigning? The city where Yuan Bao lives is a live broadcast city, which once ranked among the top in the number of anchors on Kuaishou. There was a parent in Yuan Bao's class who was doing live broadcast sales, and she followed him to learn for a while.

After she bought the live broadcast equipment, the parent provided her with a business, and thus, Yuan Bao's live broadcast career in the staff dormitory began vigorously. The first product she sold was a foot patch pack. A box of 100 foot patches was priced at 39.9 yuan, and she could earn 19.95 yuan from each order.

Image source: interviewee

In the first few days of her live broadcast, all her relatives supported her. In addition to the commission for the parent who brought in "students", her income for one night really reached more than 1,000 yuan.

Yuan Bao was very excited. In a short time, the news of her transformation into a live streamer spread throughout the family. An elder who was keen on Kuaishou even sent a message to encourage her, but her sister Yuan Meng was not optimistic because her customer base was basically in the circle of acquaintances, and even the students introduced to the parent were friends and girlfriends around her.

When this wave of popularity passes, there will probably be only a few people left in her live broadcast room.

"The anchor gets nearly half of the product. Do you think it's useful enough to be repurchased? Besides, if you don't invest in traffic, why should the platform give you traffic?" The elder sister sarcastically mocked her. Yuan Bao was skeptical, but within a few days, her elder sister's words came true. She said she was hoarse in the live broadcast room, and few people came to visit.

Her best friend asked her to use some talent to attract traffic, after all, kindergarten teachers also have a certain talent for performance. Isn't the girl who became popular with the song "Wa Ya Wa" also a kindergarten teacher? Yuan Bao had no choice but to try to do it. She sang during live broadcasts, and when she was free, she posted some film and television clips on her Douyin account.

But the scene that had cooled down never heated up again.

Yuan Bao didn't catch up with the good times in the live broadcast industry. As early as 2022, the Internet celebrity industry was far from being as profitable as the legend said.

That year, 95.2% of anchors had a monthly income of less than 5,000 yuan, and only 0.4% had a monthly income of more than 100,000 yuan. But there are still countless young people who are crazy about it. According to the data of the Ministry of Commerce, in the first half of 2023, the cumulative live broadcast sales of key monitored e-commerce platforms reached 1.27 trillion yuan, the cumulative number of live broadcasts exceeded 110 million, and the number of active anchors exceeded 2.7 million.

Mr. Huang, who is known for his digging, has at least become popular, but when will Mr. Yuan, who sells foot stickers, be able to wait for a huge amount of traffic? This question seems to be no different from the logic of winning the lottery.

4. Final

In 2024, young workers have not been less "beaten" in the workplace. Amidst the bitterness, they have started their own "sideline", but how to start a sideline and what to do? It's like a curse that has trapped them in the same place, with no way out.

There seem to be many opportunities, but behind every choice, there seems to be a huge trap hidden.

Perhaps, what is more terrible than unemployment is the anxiety and internal circulation caused by it. It is more like a road with no end. Once you set foot on it, it is difficult to get out. But if you don't walk it once, you will always feel unwilling.

Author: Dao Zong;

Public account: Daozongyouli