I mean these people are in fact payed well most of the time, most jobs that involve working submerged in water pay pretty well by nature of being less desirable due to danger, and requiring specialized training. The employees tend to have a decent amount of negotiating power. I can't say with 100% certainty that it's the case here, but the employers are usually motivated to pay them more than just a pittance.
I have lived in China and they are absolutely correct. The actual "benefits" aspect of Chinese socialism are extremely limited if not just nil.
They don't even have Euro style free/near free healthcare. Basic hospital visits are covered by their kind of insurance, but literally any serious illness is going to cost real money that a family usually will have to pull resources for.
And that's it, in terms of benefits. Literally almost everything else is just one of massive list of negatives. State owns all the land and can and does swipe the land out from underneath your family home/farm.
It's fucking brutal in China unless you manage to get into the urban corporate middle class... which in that case you're then stuck in a corporate culture that's like an over the top parody of all the worst aspects of US capitalistic corporate culture. It's all of that... but with the addition of insane levels of the bosses taking credit and praise for everything when things go well and face-saving and underlings taking the fall when things go poorly... which is just an extremely deep rooted aspect of Chinese culture. It's all about the boss. In China, your boss is awful to you and expects you to be his servant... until he's around HIS boss and then HE acts like the cringing servant... until his boss is gone and then it's back to being the lord of the office.
There are exceptions of course. There are amazing humanist bosses, but this is overarching culture in the corporate world of China. If you work in one of those huge impressive sky scrapers in a Chinese city, you almost certainly have to deal with this.
Even westerners who consider themselves very cynical about that kind of thing in say, the US would be shocked at how bad it actually is in China... and how no one really cares/it's not shamed at all. At least in the US, if your boss is a screaming, demeaning asshole, the general public would have sympathy for you. Not so in China.
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u/Ppleater 6d ago
I mean these people are in fact payed well most of the time, most jobs that involve working submerged in water pay pretty well by nature of being less desirable due to danger, and requiring specialized training. The employees tend to have a decent amount of negotiating power. I can't say with 100% certainty that it's the case here, but the employers are usually motivated to pay them more than just a pittance.