Help Wanted: Willing to eat bitterness (must relocate to China)

[Jim Warren]

Seen the June National Geographic? http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0706/feature4/

China's Instant Cities.

Wow, just wow. The catch phrase is "Do the work of two and do two days work in one"
The whole article is online and it is a mind blower.
Guys design a complete factory floor layout on a piece of scrap paper in the morning and want the contractors bid that afternoon.
Crouching tiger, not at all hidden dragon.

Boss Wang posted a handwritten job notice on the factory gate:

1. Ages 18 to 35, middle-school education
2. Good health, good quality
3. Attentive to hygiene, willing to eat bitterness and work hard.

All across the Lishui development zone, young people wandered in packs, reading the factory signs that had been posted at the end of the New Year holiday. At the local job fair, migrants gazed up at a digital board with listings so terse they read like code:

"Cashiers, women, 1.66 meters <5.4 feet> or taller"
"Willing to eat bitterness and work hard, 25 to 45 yuan a day, male,
middle school"
"Male workers 35 yuan, female workers 25 yuan"
"Average workers, people from Jiangxi and Sichuan need not apply."

There were no euphemisms, no apologies. If a company preferred its women to be tall, they asked for tall women. If they had a prejudice against a certain region, tough luck. At a factory called Jinchao, the guard turned away all applicants from Guizhou, the poorest province in China. When I asked the manager why, he said, "Around here, a lot of the petty criminals are from Guizhou." At Yashun, Boss Gao's father handled the hiring, and I sat in on a job interview in which he asked an applicant how old she was. The woman said, "Do you mean my real age, or the age that's on my identity card?" She explained that seven years ago, when she had first left home, she'd forged the ID because she'd been so young. The man offered her a job; he told me that a woman like that must really enjoy working.

In China, minimum wage varies by region, and Lishui's is about 40 cents an hour. Yashun offered jobs at the lowest rate, but applicants poured in; there was no shortage of unskilled labor. Boss Gao's father kept a pile of bra rings on his desk, to show what the factory produced. On the second day, after the workers' list was full, he told an applicant that her name would be on the backup sheet.

[Kurovski]

1. It's the model employers still left in the U.S. long for.

Don't tell me they don't.

[treestar]

2. What morans

If they don't pick the best workers they will lose.

[NewJeffCT]

3. It's like that for everything around there

You'll find every TV news anchor there is either an attractive young woman or an older, scholarly man.

If you want to work as a flight attendent, a woman should be at least 5'7" tall, bilingual and have a college degree.

Call a hotel in China, and you'll most likely hear them answer first in English, and then follow-up in Chinese.

Also, read an article last year about how one factory only wanted to hire people born in the Year of the Dog because they were supposedly more loyal employees (so, you'd have employee age being each 12 years apart)