Maybe It's Time to Drop Our Stereotype of Blue-Collar Workers — SF Express's Couriers Show Us Why

Better educated on average, creating more value, and in steadily growing demand, the blue-collar class may be undoing the old stereotype that manual laborers belong at the bottom of society. These SF Express couriers are a sign of it.

Five years ago, Guo Zihao had just landed a new job in Beijing.

He still remembers the scene at his hometown reunion in Inner Mongolia that Chinese New Year: old classmates sitting in a circle, asking the usual reunion questions — what do you do now, what company are you at. Most of his classmates from civil engineering were working at construction firms.

When it was Guo's turn, he hesitated. "I deliver packages," he said. "I felt so humiliated at the time, so ashamed."

Five years on, Guo is still delivering packages for SF Express. But at the New Year gatherings now, he feels much more at ease.

In May 2016, at 29, he bought his first car. In his second year at SF Express, he bought a home back in Inner Mongolia. These days there isn't much left after the monthly mortgage payment, but he feels settled — that sense of shame is gone for good. "The pay is decent now, and I've made my peace with it," he said. "We're all the same, really. It's just that our jobs are different — mine is harder, more tiring."

He doesn't envy the classmates who stuck with their original trade. In recent years, when projects wrapped up at the end of the year, he often watched them chase property owners for money, sometimes going unpaid. "Business isn't good for them either — it's the same everywhere," he said again, pressing the point.

Guo, meanwhile, collects a relatively stable income on time every month — a base salary plus commission. In peak season, around Singles' Day or Chinese New Year, he can make as much as 15,000 yuan; his pay swings by three to four thousand yuan between busy and slow months, averaging out to about 10,000 yuan.

SF Express couriers who have worked two or three years in a first-tier city can generally reach that level.

The Money Has Caught Up

What made Guo feel out of place was that a courier is a blue-collar worker.

Guo graduated in 2011 from the civil engineering department of Hebei Vocational and Technical College. The school ranked below even China's third tier of undergraduate institutions, but it did leave him with an associate degree — and for a young man who had been to college, sitting at a desk as a white-collar employee seemed like the natural order of things.

China's university expansion, which began in 1999, opened higher education to far more people, but the flood of graduates entering the market every year also steadily eroded their edge in it.

According to the research firm MyCOS, graduates with bachelor's degrees in 2015 earned an average of 3,694 yuan a month, while the National Bureau of Statistics put the average wage for the same period at 62,029 yuan a year — 5,169 yuan a month. A white collar was worth less and less.

Blue-collar income, meanwhile, kept climbing.

According to the 2015 New Blue-Collar Salary Report, published jointly by Ganji.com and Peking University, this class numbered 270 million people in China and earned an average of 3,163 yuan a month, up 4.3% from 2014. Shanghai's blue-collar workers earned the most, at 4,276 yuan.

White-collar pay over the same period in 2015 was 6,070 yuan. Comparing Shanghai again, figures from ManpowerGroup showed fresh graduates in non-technical jobs earning 4,000 to 4,500 yuan. Blue-collar and white-collar incomes were no longer worlds apart.

A company like SF Express may be moving faster still. Founded in 1993, it has long led China's express delivery industry; it has disclosed annual sales of 57.483 billion yuan and profit of 3.693 billion yuan, which works out to 29,700 yuan of profit per employee.

Couriers make up 69% of the company's core staff, and their pay of around 10,000 yuan a month, sometimes more, is tied closely to the value they create.

Income is often what builds a person's confidence and sense of security, so new blue-collar workers like Guo feel less and less that they rank below anyone else.

The term "blue collar" came from the United States. Robert Reich, author of The Work of Nations, sorted workers into three groups: skilled workers who make factory goods, workers across a wide range of service industries, and workers who solve production and technical problems. The first group usually wore blue work uniforms, hence "blue collar"; the third usually wore dark suits, white shirts and ties, hence "white collar."

In Western economics, blue-collar work has always meant low wages, thin benefits, no training or chance of advancement, and an endless round of simple labor.

But at a company like SF Express, which depends on the steady output of its blue-collar workforce, that is changing.

Cheng Bai is a veteran at SF Express too, like Guo — this is his fourth year. Not long ago he received a red envelope worth 3,888 yuan, the company's reward to employees after it listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange on February 23 this year. The top photo in Cheng's WeChat Moments these days is a screenshot of that red envelope. Asked about the listing, Cheng jumped in: "The whole world is watching. People ask me what benefits we get," he said. "The envelopes went by seniority — mine was one of the bigger ones among the couriers."

Turnover in blue-collar industries is enormous, and workers like Cheng and Guo, who have stayed at the same courier company for three or even five years and more, are rare — yet at SF Express, long-serving veterans are ordinary. A relatively stable income, plus a sense of pride the company cultivates, has given them a new kind of security. You catch it in small details: "SF Express guarantees delivery times — we have our own planes," said courier Gao Xiang. They are willing to give this job more years, which traditional blue-collar work rarely gets.

Yan Liping, director of flexible staffing at ManpowerGroup, said she isn't sure couriers should still be called traditional blue-collar workers at all — their standing, in her view, has risen a great deal.

And they are only one of the changes the internet has brought. Across the wider service sector, blue-collar workers are evolving along with technology and the economy too — the after-sales technicians for computers and new electronic office equipment, the customer-service staff in call centers, even the technicians handling advanced technology inside factories.

The sharing economy, the most-discussed topic of the moment, is blurring the line between blue collar and white collar further. This new model has no employment contracts, is highly flexible and often pays well, which is why it draws people from every kind of background. In that open environment, white-collar and blue-collar workers have turned up in the same "outfit" for the first time: doing the same work, facing the same bonus system.

Work like this challenges people's fixed ideas about occupation and class. Whether it's a Didi driver or someone on the street pumping up shared bikes, in the process "they've all been armed with a keener sense of the times," Yan said.

A Big, Proper Company — Talking Business No Differently From the Men in Suits

Every industry has its own folklore about competition, and express delivery is no exception. Outsiders like to joke that the business splits into SF Express and everyone else. Inside SF Express they have their own comparison. "The Tongda couriers (ZTO, YTO, STO, Yunda) are the corner shop somebody runs out of their own house. SF Express is 7-Eleven or FamilyMart," said Gao Xiang.

The comparison is really about business models. The Tongda couriers' franchised outlets are loosely managed, while SF Express runs directly operated branches nationwide, with every employee and every task under headquarters.

To Gao, a vocational-college graduate, that difference comes down to one word: proper. A hot industry combined with the discipline of a large corporation draws not only people from traditional blue-collar work but also better-qualified graduates of vocational and junior colleges, like Gao himself.

Among the SF Express couriers we interviewed, only one had stopped at middle school; the rest had all been to vocational or junior colleges, mostly at the associate-degree level. That is no accident. According to the 2013 Survival Report on the Urban "New Blue Collar", 13.36% of new blue-collar workers held a bachelor's degree or higher and 30.46% held an associate degree.

Gao is typical of them. Shortly before he graduated in 2011, he sent in a resume online, interviewed with SF Express's Guangzhou HR department and took a pre-employment physical — a sequence no different from the big companies he had interviewed with before. Before starting, Gao and several hundred other new hires from across Guangdong spent seven days in military-style training at the company's South China training base. Mornings, hundreds of people in camouflage did physical drills; afternoons, they sat in classrooms for business training.

The induction training was only the first step; that sense of propriety runs through the daily work as well. "Not just once a week — we have meetings at the outlet every few days," Gao said. Each district in Guangdong has dozens of large branches, and under each branch sit smaller outlets. These outlets are nothing like the chaotic pickup-and-delivery depots you might picture — they serve as meeting room, canteen, break room and warehouse at once. You often see an outlet manager at the same table as dozens of couriers, running a training session on some new line of business.

All of it left Gao well satisfied with his new job. "I felt the company was proper — it had the scale, the nerve and the methods of a big corporation," he said. He considers it a good choice for life after graduation.

At SF Express, couriers are called frontline staff because they are closest to the customer. What's interesting is that most frontline couriers have no wish to move to the second or third line — outlet manager, operations supervisor and the like. To Gao there is nothing to discuss: "You make money on the frontline, then you go out and start your own little business. If it works, you don't come back. If it doesn't, you come back to the frontline."

The second and third lines are not on his list at all.

Couriers don't envy the people in the office, because they know perfectly well that "only frontline couriers make money — the more you do, the more you get." Outlet supervisors often earn less than a veteran courier, since supervisors are judged on performance targets and get no commission.

Even Li Huaiming, ten years a courier at SF Express in Chongqing, is not the least bit tempted by a management job. "Honestly, there are plenty of chances to get promoted in this industry, but I've never taken one. It's simple — after a promotion the pressure is higher and the pay is lower than a courier's."

Cheng Bai thinks the same, and he is happy enough with where he works; sometimes he feels he is the office tower's real long-term resident. He has handled pickups and deliveries for this Beijing building for more than three years; many of the companies inside have run through several receptionists, and in three years he has been the only SF Express courier.

By now every face in the building is familiar.

Cheng's favorite part of the day is the morning elevator ride — each time someone steps in, he presses their floor before they can. "I know where they're all going. Everyone I meet in that elevator knows me," he said, a little pleased with himself.

In this building Cheng runs into couriers from other companies every day. Sometimes he feels like the company's HR rep, answering questions from would-be applicants. "Every courier company comes asking whether we're hiring — even EMS asked me," Cheng said. "They want to switch because they don't make enough. Everyone's very direct about it."

Guo is the "HR rep" for another office tower. In his territory he has already brought one courier from YTO and one from Yunda over to SF Express.

In the long run this may be a good thing. When one company stands out in an industry, it pulls more people into that field, or into that company. And as that workforce grows, the line between blue collar and white collar can only blur further.

As blue-collar jobs diversify, what they demand is no longer simple, repetitive work. Even inside a single company, the targets rise year after year. Liu Xu, who joined SF Express in Qingdao as a courier four years ago, feels it sharply: "There's far more pressure than before, and far more metrics from the company. A few years ago it was quality; now it's business, revenue, profit."

As if those three clipped phrases still didn't convey how he felt, he went on: "It's been strict since 2014. If your territory's pickup volume stops growing, that means something's wrong with you," he said. "Sometimes it really is exhausting."

Simply getting through the day's pickups and deliveries on time is work enough, but SF Express now leans harder on business targets like growth in territory pickup volume, pushing couriers to keep developing new clients — corporate accounts that can be billed monthly. Liu now has a monthly revenue target and a target for value-added services such as insurance or declared-value coverage.

The emphasis on business shows up in commissions: a pickup earns about 2 to 3 yuan, a delivery about 1 yuan. Every pickup amounts to a newly developed client, so the reward is naturally higher. Couriers all know it: "Whether you make good money depends on how well you develop clients."

That is the part that eats at Liu. He now has to push his fairly shy self to meet new clients, negotiate guaranteed delivery times and discounts to fit what they want, and build up a base of steady customers through these monthly-billing contracts.

He worries about the same things many white-collar workers, and managers well above them, worry about daily. In substance, a courier like Liu is no different from the men in suits talking deals — except Liu is wearing an SF Express uniform.

As in most industries, in express delivery the longer you last, the easier it is to get ahead.

Couriers have an unwritten promotion path: from residential compounds to office towers. The longer you stay, the more likely it is that whoever holds an office-tower route quits, or makes a mistake and is fired, and you get moved up to fill the gap. That is how Cheng was assigned to a tower: "Someone messed up and left."

The advantages of a tower are obvious. On residential routes Cheng often had to haul big boxes up the stairs, and when nobody picked up the phone he had to come back and do it all again; a compound's package volume was limited too. An office tower has elevators, and he can handle 80 to 90 packages a day, clearing pickups and deliveries in a single trip up.

He faces the same pressure to develop business as Liu, though — whenever a new company moves into the building, he has to be the first to go and pitch a contract.

They also have to keep learning new equipment and new lines of business as these arrive. The handheld scanner that uploads package information and the Bluetooth printer that pairs with it are standard kit for an SF Express courier. When Gao joined in 2012 he used one of the earliest second-generation scanners; Cheng is now on the sixth. The newest ones are practically phones — they upload data, place calls, send WeChat messages. Talking about it, Gao sounded proud: "Of course. We change our gear right in step with the global giants."

Whenever SF Express opens a new international route — Russia, the United States, Japan — Liu and Cheng get the training material promptly, learning how to handle business for the new destination, and outlet managers spot-check them on it.

To the Peking University professor Li Yining, the rising demands on blue-collar workers are a trend that cannot be avoided. In his book China's Path and the Growth of the Blue-Collar Middle Class, he writes that the blue-collar work of the future will not be simple, repetitive manual labor; as technology and industrial equipment improve, workers will have to operate machines and manage technical processes more skillfully — the operator in an automated workshop, say, or the highly skilled maintenance technician.

Such workers resemble couriers: both must train to master new technology, new lines of business or client development, to "upgrade" themselves.

The Shift From Elite to Mass Education Is Winning Blue-Collar Workers More Recognition — You Can Hold Your Heads Higher

On April 17, 2016, an SF Express courier in Beijing was hit by a reversing car; the driver got out, slapped him several times and swore at him. The story became an internet sensation the same day, and it enraged SF Express founder Wang Wei, who wrote in his WeChat Moments: "If I don't see this through to the end, I don't deserve to be SF Express's president."

A class's standing rises along with how the whole society treats it.

In China, blue-collar workers still stand fairly low. For a long time the phrase "middle class" brought white-collar workers to mind, even though worldwide there is no real connection between the middle class and white-collar work.

In fact the earliest middle classes in developed countries were mostly blue-collar workers. Take Japan in the 1970s and 80s: a country of only 126 million people had a middle class of 100 million. Postwar Japan built up manufacturing hard, improving how blue-collar workers worked and lived — and a great many of them were the first into the middle class.

Even now, blue-collar workers remain a major part of the middle class in developed countries, with the same social standing as white-collar workers. In China that shift has only just begun. Li Yining thinks the reason blue-collar workers became middle class in the West while in China they mostly sit at the bottom of society is largely that "Western countries are already post-industrial societies (moved on to finance, services or high-end advanced manufacturing), while China is still in the process of becoming an industrial one."

Gao's family didn't want him delivering packages at first. "They thought, how much can you make delivering packages, and it's exhausting." Every time he went home after that he was darker than the last visit; only when his income steadied did his family drop their fixed ideas about the courier business.

Along the way he did things many white-collar workers still haven't. By the end of his second year at SF Express he had saved 100,000 yuan. He bought his parents back home in Henan a new 120-square-meter apartment for more than 300,000 yuan, most of it his own money. "You could say it was the biggest wish I'd had since graduating, and I'd done it," he said.

Changing fixed ideas about couriers, or about the blue-collar class as a whole, is bound to take a long time.

Last April's courier incident ended with the man who hit him held in administrative detention. Wang Wei felt he had defended his couriers' rights and their dignity. In February 2017, that courier stood beside Wang Wei at the company's bell-ringing ceremony.

That is certainly one good way to raise pride and recognition, but winning over society as a whole probably depends in the end on lifting the quality of the workforce overall — which is also the lasting benefit of the university expansion: it ended elite education and turned the country toward mass education.

"Chinese students haven't yet adapted to the concept of mass education. When they enter university, they're used to thinking of themselves as part of an elite group," said Mary Gallagher, director of the University of Michigan's Center for Chinese Studies and an expert on Chinese labor.

China today has 11 times as many university students as it did in 1989.

China began expanding university enrollment in 1999. Its universities once admitted 1 million students a year; today 8 million students graduate from college annually, a figure that has already passed the United States.

You can see it in the institutions too: over the past decade the number of higher-education institutions in China has doubled, to 2,409.

That has carried China from elite education to mass education. Internationally, the "college entry rate for the eligible age group" means the share of 18-to-22-year-olds who go to university; below 15% is generally counted as elite education and above 20% as mass education. China's rate has risen from 9.8% in 1998 to 40% in 2015.

"Blue collar" used to summon up an image of little schooling, mostly below high school. Now a vocational- or junior-college graduate entering express delivery no longer looks so out of place.

It has also made the difference between blue collar and white collar subtler.

In the years ahead, more vocational- and junior-college students will pour into the big cities after graduating, and they are more likely to end up in blue-collar jobs, because white-collar positions are relatively few. For now, China's economy mainly creates blue-collar jobs: 47% of the country's economic output comes from manufacturing, mining and construction — twice the share those industries hold in the United States — while services are only getting started.

According to National Bureau of Statistics data, new blue-collar workers aged 21 to 40 make up 53% of the blue-collar class. As more vocational- and junior-college students in their early twenties graduate in the coming years, that share may grow.

And that may be a good thing. When a society has no extremely rich and no extremely poor class, and the middle holds the majority, everyone has a chance to rise. New blue-collar workers like Guo will be one of the forces driving that change.

Of course, when it comes to recognizing this new blue-collar class, the recognition that matters most may have to come from the workers themselves.

After Guo bought his new car last year, when he drove in to check in at the outlet each morning he would always take care to park where nobody could see it. "I don't dare drive right up to the company in plain sight — it doesn't look good if people see."

You can hold your heads a little higher.

(At the interviewees' request, all courier names in this article are pseudonyms.)

Reporters Lianchao Lan and Yixiao Wu also contributed to this article.

Graphics: Feng Xiuxia

Cover image: NYT, WordPress