Under the bridge hole of Liuli Bridge, some woven bags are piled up, and a female migrant worker sits in the middle to rest, her face is blocked.
On the afternoon of March 29, Tang Conghe stood by the roadside of Liuli Bridge and waited.
wait for work
Migrant workers in Liuliqiao, Beijing found that this year's work was particularly difficult to find.
Liuli Bridge, located at the intersection of the West Third Ring Road and the Beijing-Hong Kong-Macao Expressway, used to be a famous private labor market in Beijing. After several changes, there are still some migrant workers gathered, waiting for recruiters to drive vans to "pull people".
62-year-old Chen Tongfu only receives two days of work a month, cleaning and transporting garbage on the construction site, earning 200 yuan a day.
The 53-year-old Xu Lushan last visited the construction site in August last year, and has not found a day of work since then.
He suffered from eye disease 7 years ago, and 3 months ago, he ran out of money, relying on the help of the workers and the leftovers in the trash cans on the street to survive.
The 59-year-old Tang Conghe was lucky. Last month, a kind worker introduced him to demolish the walls and floor tiles in the building. The wages were 250 yuan a day, and he worked for 12 days.
At 5 p.m. in late March, most of the migrant workers had left Liuli Bridge. Tang Conghe sat alone on the side of the road, wearing a fat camouflage padded jacket with black cuffs.
He is less than 1.6 meters tall and wears a pair of pink-rimmed glasses picked up by the roadside. Behind the lenses, his right eye is blood red, saying it was because of getting angry.
He did not get his wages for 5 days, 1,250 yuan.
The owner of the construction site said that there were still 3 toilets that had not been removed, and told him to go back and wait a few days, and then tie it up after the removal.
So Tang Conghe came to Liuliqiao every day and waited. As long as the boss called, he could rush to the construction site immediately.
Because of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, many construction sites in Beijing have been closed.
In the group of migrant workers, there is noticeably less news of recruitment.
Zhang Shun, a carpenter, said that in the past, the construction work of the funeral home could earn 500 yuan a day, but this year it was only 300 or 400 yuan, and the workers were still rushing to do it.
For older migrant workers, it's not just the epidemic that needs to be worried.
In the past three years, Shanghai, Tianjin, Shenzhen, Guangdong, Taizhou, Jiangsu, Nanchang, Jiangxi, Jingzhou, Hubei and other places have successively issued orders for the removal of over-aged migrant workers in the construction industry.
In 2019, Shanghai issued a document prohibiting men under the age of 18, men over the age of 60, and women over the age of 50 from entering the construction site to engage in construction work.
Male workers over the age of 55 and female workers over the age of 45 are prohibited from entering the construction site to engage in underground, high-altitude, high temperature, particularly heavy physical labor or other special work that affects physical health and is dangerous and high-risk.
"In the past two years, some construction sites have started to have regulations, and those over 60 are not allowed!" said a 55-year-old Chongqing worker.
He hasn't found a job for 15 days.
The five migrant workers over the age of 55 who were randomly interviewed had the experience of being rejected by the construction site because of their age.
On a construction site recruitment app, a large number of recruitment notices indicate that only workers "under the age of 55" are required.
In some recruitments, the upper age limit is set at 45 or 50.
Older migrant workers are being weeded out, but many do not want to leave.
Migrant workers under Liuli Bridge believe that despite the tightening of age policies, at least for now, construction sites can still "take in" them.
old construction site
On the other hand, Su Qin, the head of a decoration and decoration company, is facing the dilemma of "can't recruit workers".
After a long period of time after the recruitment information was sent out, I received a message about applying for a job; a bricklayer's post was vacant for 7 days and no one was interested; the wages were increasing year by year, but the young workers were decreasing year by year.
Su Qin said that under the epidemic, the willingness of migrant workers to go to work in other places has been greatly reduced, the mobility of personnel is small, and there are few workers in the labor market.
Sometimes, when a worker is just recruited online, when he hears that he wants to leave the province, the other party refuses.
In addition, young people are increasingly reluctant to enter construction sites.
As early as 2008, an article in "Population Research", the journal of the Chinese Population Society, mentioned that compared with the first generation of migrant workers, the new generation of migrant workers are more engaged in service industries such as catering and sales, while those engaged in construction, The proportion of "dirty, tiring and dangerous" occupations such as mining has decreased significantly.
Su Qin has been doing renovation projects for 20 years.
At first, the construction site was filled with young men in their 20s, and there were also some 18 or 19-year-olds, who used the construction site as a school, and followed the old masters as apprentices and learned techniques.
Now, there are more than 80 workers at the construction site where Su Qin works, half of them are over 50 years old, and there are five or six workers over 60 years old.
The construction site is getting old.
The "2020 Migrant Workers Monitoring and Survey Report" released by the National Bureau of Statistics shows that since 2016, the average age of my country's migrant workers has increased year by year.
In 2020, the average age of migrant workers was 41.4 years old, an increase of 2.4 years from 2016; the proportion of migrant workers over 50 years old was 26.4%, an increase of 7.3% from 2016.
A foreman from Harbin said that due to the lack of young people, most of the local construction sites are still recruiting older migrant workers to supplement the labor gap.
Lu Dewen, a researcher at the China Rural Governance Research Center of Wuhan University, also found in the survey that migrant workers over the age of 60 still account for a "non-negligible" proportion of construction workers.
He believes that the reason why the construction market can maintain a balance is precisely because of the support of some older migrant workers.
"From the perspective of the whole system, the city still needs them." Lu Dewen told China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily.
As the "aging" of construction sites intensifies, young migrant workers are becoming more and more sought-after.
In the past month, Zhang Shun, who is in his 40s, has earned more than 10,000 yuan "even with rest and work".
"Like us, we do some good jobs, and we don't do those bad jobs," he said.
By contrast, getting older means less pay.
For example, when laying floor tiles, wages are calculated according to the area. Older workers are slow to paste, and they will receive less wages in a day.
Many workers volunteer to work overtime at night in order to earn more money.
In the "point work" calculated according to the number of days, the difference in wages is even more obvious: a young plumber is 300 yuan a day, and if it is over 60 years old, it is about 250 yuan.
"Construction and decoration, after all, are still jobs that sell physical strength and handicraft. Once you get older, your physical strength, eyesight, and manual work can't keep up. Even if the old workers are skilled, the quality of the work is not as good as that of young workers. "Su Qin explained.
When asked how many workers are considered "young" at the construction site, Su Qin hardly hesitated: "Be in your forties."
The countryside that can't go back
Tang Conghe, with blood-red eyes, worked odd jobs on the construction site for 9 years.
He was deceived into the black brick factory twice, and since then he no longer has confidence in the long-term workers.
The construction site is huge and temporary, and odd jobs are active. Tang Conghe loves it here.
Moreover, the daily wages of gig workers are often higher than that of long-term workers, because room and board are not included.
Lv Dewen believes that an important consideration when older migrant workers choose to do odd jobs on construction sites is that the price of odd jobs is equal to their hard work.
"We don't need to 'sad' them. Objectively, the satisfaction of older migrant workers is relatively high."
It is also a day’s effort, and you can only earn a little over 100 yuan in landscaping; in sanitation, you have few opportunities and overcharge long-term workers; as a security guard, there are too many liars and intermediaries, and they are sent here. If you refuse, you will not get the money. .
Han Shuan, a 58-year-old migrant worker, is worried, "I worked as a security guard for a month, and I still have 300 yuan to pay! The money is not much, but he owes me a month! If he doesn't give it to me, he will have no money to eat!"
Not to do unstable long-term labor, this is the experience Tang Conghe has accumulated in the past 9 years, and it is also the reason why he refuses to leave the construction site.
Eleven years ago, Tang Conghe came to Beijing by train from his hometown of Bazhong, Sichuan, in order to save money for medical treatment for his mother.
For the first two years, he worked in a brick factory in Shunyi, transporting the fired bricks from the kiln to the truck with a trolley. The bricks were a bit taller than him.
Morning and evening shifts for more than 10 hours, the high temperature in the brick kiln almost baked him.
After working for two years, Tang Conghe was too tired to bear it, so he left the brick factory and went to the construction site to do odd jobs. All the money he earned, except for living expenses, was sent back to his home in the countryside.
In 2017, the mother died, and the wife left Tang Conghe with the child because the family was too poor, and there was almost no contact since then.
Xu Lushan is from Gaodaochang Village, Longgu Township, Huangchuan County, Henan Province.
In 1998, the second round of land contracting was carried out in rural areas across the country. Xu Lushan was working outside, and his elderly parents could not plant the land, so he did not want the land allocated by the village.
After his parents passed away, the family's earthen house collapsed because it was uninhabited all the year round.
With no land, no house, and no way to go back to the countryside, Xu Lushan said that he has become a rootless "wandering soul" in the city.
The gray-haired Chen Tongfu talked about the reason why he came to Beijing to work: "The two children are not filial. When the second child got married, he repaired his house and bought a car. It cost more than 800,000 yuan, and I took the money. Now there is another one. The 200,000 yuan borrowed has not been repaid, and neither of the two children is willing to pay it back... I am the only one who will pay it back. If the debt is not repaid, what should I do?"
"Those who are still on construction sites at the age of 60 are generally migrant workers with heavy family burdens." Lu Dewen said, "Farmer families are in the process of 'transforming and entering the city', and their children have to settle down in the city, so This generation of migrant workers needs the accumulation of work to support the entire family, and the income from farming alone cannot develop his family.”
In the next 10 years, my country will still be in the stage of rapid urbanization.
According to the Green Paper on Population and Labor, about 160 million rural people will move to cities and towns by 2035.
This means that in the future, there may still be a large number of migrant workers over the age of 60 who urgently need to find a place to make a living in the city.
Older migrant workers are "inseparable from construction sites", and there are also pension issues behind them.
In the "Children of Migrant Workers" group on Douban, a post "Parents' pension issues are the most worrying" received the most replies.
The post wrote: "Although I have been doing the hardest and most boring job in my life, I don't have social security, rural cooperative medical care, and the critical illness insurance offered by the local government. I can report a lot for serious illnesses, but there are very few reports for minor illness clinics, and the premiums are also low. It's skyrocketing... My parents are 55, they can still work for a few years! I'm only two years after graduation, and will be independent." A few years ago, I started to go out to work with my relatives, and my daily salary was 380 yuan.
Like many older migrant workers, Tang Conghe did not pay social insurance, citing lack of money.
Now, all he cares about is where to find the next construction site, and where the last job is overdue.
"There's an old saying, don't you know? A person's life is like a feather on the water..." Inside the bridge hole, the loud noise of passing cars engulfed the second half of his sentence.
security cost
According to media reports, safety factors are the main reason for the policy of "removing" older migrant workers.
In 2018, among the fatalities in construction safety accidents in Shanghai, 15% were over 60 years old, while among local construction workers, only 1% were over 60 years old.
Huo Wei, deputy director of the Beijing Zhicheng Migrant Workers Legal Aid and Research Center, believes that "removing over-age migrant workers" at construction sites is not only a result of production safety considerations, but also the result of rising labor costs in recent years.
"The main concern of construction sites is the large amount of compensation for over-age migrant workers who are injured. In recent years, the profits of construction sites have been far less than before. Some skilled migrant workers have higher wages, labor costs have increased, and construction sites are more reluctant to hire The elderly, bear the risk of compensation." Huo Wei said.
She once represented a case where a migrant worker was injured on the construction site and became a vegetative person, and finally the construction site owner compensated 2 million yuan.
"For a small construction site, it is not easy to earn 2 million yuan after completion. If one worker is injured, all the money earned will be lost. Not to mention what if two or three people are injured?"
"Whether migrant workers over the retirement age can be identified as work-related injuries due to work-related injuries," there is still a lot of controversy in the legal circle.
In the existing regulations, after the age of 60 for men and 50 for women reaches the legal retirement age, the labor relationship between migrant workers and the construction site is no longer.
Some judgments hold that over-age migrant workers do not apply to the Regulations on Work Injury Insurance, so after being injured, over-age migrant workers can only apply for compensation in accordance with the Interpretation of the Supreme People's Court on Several Issues concerning the Application of Law in the Trial of Personal Injury Compensation Cases.
In the Regulations on Work Injury Insurance, a large part of the compensation is paid by the social security fund.
However, according to the latter compensation standard, not only the construction site has to bear a larger proportion of the compensation, but also the workers themselves.
Huo Wei recently represented a worker's compensation case for a female migrant worker, a 53-year-old who was injured on the construction site.
According to the law, her compensation should be divided into three parts: a one-time disability benefit, a one-time work-related injury medical benefit and a one-time disability employment benefit.
However, the construction site believed that she had reached the retirement age and there was no employment problem, so she refused to give a one-time disability employment subsidy.
Huo Wei lost both the arbitration stage and the first-instance stage, but won the second-instance case and received compensation.
When reviewing previous cases, she found that different intermediate courts in Beijing have different standards for judging work-related injuries of migrant workers who have reached the retirement age, and there is no uniform judgment standard.
In Lu Dewen's view, improving the safety of construction sites does not necessarily require the removal of over-aged migrant workers.
If you are concerned about safety issues, you can improve management norms and basic safety facilities; if you are worried about labor rights disputes, you need to improve the labor contract system and policy implementation environment.
In terms of labor capacity alone, in most peasant families, the 60-year-old is still a prime-age labor force.
Lu Dewen suggested that the standard of "clearing and retiring" can be softened to become whether there is labor ability, rather than a one-size-fits-all "60 years old".
Three years ago, Tang Conghe hit an electric pick on the construction site, and fragments of the tile flew into his eyes. He asked the doctor to use tweezers to pick out the fragments. Since then, his eyes turned blood red and he couldn't see anything. clear.
He also coughed frequently due to smoking and exposure to dust all year round. "We are also at this age, and there will always be some problems with our bodies." Suddenly, Tang Conghe, who was waiting for wages and new jobs, became a helpless old man.
(Chen Tongfu and Zhang Shun are pseudonyms in the text)
Intern Jia Jinghan and photo source: China Youth Daily