More Than 10 Million People Do Gig Work for Internet Companies. What Is Their Life Actually Like?

They find work on their phones, work with their phones, relax on their phones, and are managed by their phones. This is the story of more than 30 food-delivery riders, same-city couriers, bike-share street crews and cleaners.

Beijing, July. On the service road of the East Third Ring Road, the fastest thing on the street is always a motorcycle threading through traffic without slowing down.

"In Beijing, only a motorcycle is fast," Bai Junyong said. The jammed cars around him dropped away, and the hot air, motionless a second earlier, blew straight into his face. In ten minutes Bai Junyong picked up a document at Wanda CBD and delivered it to Xingfu Jiayuan, 6.3 kilometers away. He said he works for Shansong; his fastest run took under 40 minutes, from collecting a document downtown to handing it over at the airport.

Shansong is a same-city courier service you order by phone. It promises delivery anywhere inside Beijing within an hour and advertises an average of 39 minutes for 15 kilometers.

Bai Junyong has done this on and off for more than a year. What he likes best is the freedom: no morning meeting, no clocking in. He paid 150 yuan to sign up, which bought him a Shansong delivery box and a work badge, sat through two training sessions in an office building near Shuangqiao subway station, and could then start taking jobs on the platform. Shansong takes 20% of every order; the rest is his.

Seven or eight years ago he came to Beijing from Linfen, Shanxi. He had been a miner at a small local coal mine and had worked his way up to foreman, but the mine was shut down in a crackdown on privately run pits.

He says little about the work in Shanxi. Asked how he lost the little finger on his right hand, he answered flatly: "There was an accident at the mine." In Beijing he first drove trucks and hauled cement, but his bosses often held back his pay.

Last year Bai Junyong spent about 6,000 yuan on a motorcycle and joined the ranks of Shansong couriers. Over the past year he has usually made six or seven thousand yuan a month, though he has to fill the tank every two days, 70 yuan a time.

"Last year the money was pretty good — my best days were about 600 yuan. This year it's no good. I haven't had a single day over 300." In the QQ group Bai Junyong belongs to, a screenshot of someone earning 736 yuan in one day still gets passed around as encouragement. He has heard that 70,000 or 80,000 people in Beijing are now doing Shansong runs part-time, which makes orders harder to grab.

Bai Junyong rents a place near Sihui subway station on the East Fourth Ring Road and lives there with his wife for 1,000 yuan a month. But he doesn't go home every night. He would rather stay out until morning taking the urgent evening jobs, then go home and sleep through the day.

"With Shansong, what I'm after is freedom," Bai Junyong said. That weekday, at 4 p.m., he had just finished the third job he'd grabbed that day — the system showed 67 yuan — and was heading home to rest.

But most of the people crossing the city to deliver things for internet companies are nowhere near that free.

A New Line of Work That 40 Million People Do

Since 2015, every day at noon, Beijing's streets belong to food-delivery riders. Couriers in red, yellow and blue weave through the alleys and avenues.

By an estimate the delivery platform Ele.me published this April, about 10 million people nationwide now ride for food-delivery platforms. That number includes people who registered and then took only a handful of orders, or none at all; far fewer treat delivery as a full-time job.

By the companies' own figures, Meituan and Baidu currently have 300,000 and 80,000 active riders. Working backward from market share, Ele.me has roughly 220,000.

Their jobs are all alike. The hours are, in theory, fairly flexible, but there is no fixed income — pay is counted by orders completed. They all work for internet companies, and only on short-term terms. Users order through their phones; the workers take the jobs through their phones.

The American news site The Daily Beast began calling this kind of employment the "gig economy" in 2009. A McKinsey study of gig work worldwide found that by 2015 gig workers made up 16% of the labor force.

In China, where internet services are stitched tightly to the physical world, the group is unusually large. Besides the delivery riders there are several million Didi drivers, cleaners who take jobs through 58 Home, movers who take jobs over WeChat, and the bike-share crews who shift bicycles along the curb all day.

The Internet Society of China and the State Information Center said in a 2017 report on the sharing economy that 40 million people do this kind of work.

That is 4% of China's labor force.

Plenty of them, like Bai Junyong, came to Beijing from somewhere else. Unemployment, and the hope of earning more in a big city, pushed them out of their hometowns. The decline of manufacturing is a familiar story too: factories in Guangdong that once ran overtime all year could not get orders, and since 2013 have simply idled from New Year's Day through to Chinese New Year. The China Labour Statistical Yearbook 2015 counted 4.864 million unemployed people across the 17 provinces targeted for cutting overcapacity.

Now That the Subsidies Are Gone, These Jobs Pay About 5,000 to 6,000 Yuan a Month

At 4 p.m. on a weekday in late June, the rider Zhang Fan sat on his electric scooter beside a colleague, both of them bent over their phones, looking up now and then to chat. Three to four in the afternoon is the only idle hour these Meituan riders get.

Zhang Fan has worked for Meituan for two years. He belongs to a delivery station in the Guomao business district and covers a radius of about three kilometers. It is a big station, more than 100 riders, not one of them a Beijinger.

Every morning at 9 they clock in with their team leader near Guomao subway station for a morning meeting. It opens with "attention" and "at ease," and the content is always the same three things: safety, on-time rate, dress code.

Noon is Zhang Fan's busiest stretch. Order floods are common, and in dense office districts a rider sometimes carries more than ten meals at once.

Two years ago Zhang Fan closed the small grocery store he ran in Anhui and came to Beijing with his wife. Getting hired at Meituan is simple: bring your ID card and bank card and find the station manager. After registering, riders also have to get a health certificate.

Zhang Fan joined Meituan just as the three big delivery platforms began burning cash. In late July 2015, Baidu Delivery raised US$250 million on its own. In August, Ele.me raised US$630 million. In October, Meituan and Dianping merged. In December, Alibaba acquired Ele.me.

After the funding and the mergers came the huge subsidy war: instant discounts for users, and more money for riders.

When Zhang Fan started two years ago, the base salary was 3,700 yuan. That is the period he misses. "Back then not many people did this job, delivering was really easy, and you could make over 7,000 a month without trying."

With the subsidies, ordering in was much cheaper than eating at the restaurant, and order volumes swelled. "Back then you grabbed your own orders, and the distances were all really short — you could even walk them," Zhang Fan said.

It didn't last. Competition in delivery kept escalating. As volumes grew, more and more riders poured onto the platforms. Zhang Fan watched his base salary fall from 3,700 to 3,200 and now to 3,000 yuan; he has to finish 600 orders a month before the 5-yuan-per-order bonus starts.

Last year the Guomao station switched from riders grabbing orders on their phones to the system assigning them. Whoever is assigned has to go; if the load feels too heavy, that is not their call.

Five or six thousand yuan is less than riders made in the platforms' high-subsidy days, but for a job with almost no skill barrier it is still a decent sum.

The research firm MyCOS put the average starting salary for 2016 college graduates at 4,300 yuan a month, and the National Bureau of Statistics put the average monthly wage over the same period at just 5,169 yuan. For traditional blue-collar work, a Ganji.com report found that in Beijing in 2015 the figure was only 3,500 yuan a month.

A normal month already earns these riders more than the typical Chinese university graduate. But with the subsidies over, pushing up to seven or eight thousand a month has become very hard.

"These jobs are all about five or six thousand. You see the recruitment ads online saying seven or eight thousand a month — that's a lie. Once you're in, you have to work extra to get that much, and sometimes working extra still doesn't get you there," Zhang Sheng, who moves ofo bikes around Zhongguancun every day, told QDaily. Most of the 30-odd gig workers we spoke to named similar numbers.

Compared with their previous jobs, this is fairly reliable money. Many internet companies pay out once a week. More than one worker described the misery of earlier work at a coal mine, a construction site or a factory, where wages came only once every six months or once a year.

On the other hand, most companies do not cut a worker's pay at will while the workload and the results stay the same. Internet companies can adjust a gig worker's pay day by day. As for severance, there is none.

Internet companies use income to drive these short-term workers, and their own business risk passes straight through to the workers, with nothing left to absorb it.

Management Runs on a Few Sets of Numbers, and There Is Almost Nowhere to Be Promoted To

Sun Xiuyan is a star worker at 58 Home. She has no long-term employment relationship with the company, but she works seven days a week, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., all year without a day off.

"In the morning I do one job, about three hours. I eat lunch at the client's home and then go to the next one. This Chinese New Year my whole family spent the holiday at a client's home," Sun Xiuyan said of her days.

When a 58 Home job is finished, the customer has to rate the worker, and 58's customer service calls periodically to follow up. Last year Sun Xiuyan scored 98% positive ratings, with no negative reviews at all.

Better ratings bring more orders and more repeat customers. It is supposedly a job with no fixed hours, yet Sun Xiuyan fills every hour of her own accord. Her son is at a university in Beijing.

Guo Yi, vice president of 58 Home, believes that organizing large numbers of gig workers this way greatly raises efficiency. He told QDaily: "By calculating ratings, distance and demand, the platform can make sure these aunties are taking orders on 58 Home at the highest possible efficiency."

Today nearly every internet service platform ties ratings to a worker's pay and to the orders they are given. A delivery rider earns an extra yuan for a good review, for instance; deliver late and the fee is halved.

The habit started with Uber. When a ride ends, the app prompts the user to rate the driver; below a certain score a driver loses subsidies, and below that he can no longer take rides.

Uber makes users rate the previous trip before starting a new one, but most platforms are not built that way. That is why delivery riders often pay to text customers asking for a good review: no rating, no bonus.

Clearly, most users will not go out of their way to leave a good rating unless they are prompted hard. They act only when they are unhappy, with a low score or a complaint.

And every platform reacts to low scores fast. One complaint typically costs a worker anywhere from a hundred to a thousand yuan — a week's work gone. During our reporting, a Koubei delivery rider who had brought the wrong meal called to say he would refund 20 yuan, as long as the customer didn't complain.

The relationship between these companies and their short-term workers is often reduced to numbers you can count: ratings, orders, delivery time, reviews, complaints.

A system of rewards and penalties built on those numbers lets a company manage hundreds of thousands of people with the fewest possible staff, and pushes workers to do more in less time and to offend no one.

"Riders get complaints very easily," Chen Xiaodong, a former Meituan station manager near Hangzhou East Railway Station, told QDaily.

Sometimes the fault is not the delivery at all: a slow kitchen or bad packaging can cause it. Along with keeping the station running, part of a station manager's job is helping riders appeal.

A station manager runs a station of anywhere from twenty or thirty people to more than a hundred. But that job, which builds real management experience, is not the next rung for a rider. Chen said the position is usually filled from outside, and few riders move up into it.

Asked what path a rider has for promotion, Chen's answer was one word: "None."

Most riders leave within three months to a year. But the barrier to entry is low and the money is not bad, so as one batch leaves another walks in. Riders like Zhang Fan, who has lasted two years, are already a minority.

What worries Zhang Fan most is accidents. By his reckoning, among the 100-odd riders there is at least one incident a day — a scrape at best, a threat to someone's life at worst. Running a red light only might cause a crash; a late delivery definitely costs money.

Every platform gives its workers accident insurance, usually 2 to 3 yuan for each day worked, deducted from the first payout.

He has not thought about when he will leave Beijing, but he feels it is only a matter of time.

"Later, when my kid has to go to school, getting a household registration here will be too hard." Zhang Fan said he likes scrolling news apps when he has nothing to do. He knows a new district is being built at Xiong'an, and figures that "every job is easy at the start, because those [internet] companies want to attract people. Beijing is getting less and less suited to people from out of town."

On the pedestrian overpass at Shuangjing, which Zhang Fan often passes on deliveries, a large red banner reading "Relocate non-capital functions in an orderly way, advance the coordinated development of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei" has hung for months.

Find Work by Phone, Work by Phone, Relax by Phone, Be Managed by Phone

Zhang Sheng is from Changchun, Jilin. Every day he rides an ofo bike to Zhongguancun. Whenever he spots another little yellow bike parked on the street, he stops to check whether the lock works and whether the plate and QR code have been scratched off.

When he finds damage he photographs it and reports it to the company over WeChat, and the company sends a repair worker. Zhang Sheng has no access to the company's back-end system; that, he says, is for the people who do repairs. In the division of labor, some people repair, some dispatch, and some, like him, maintain.

Supervisors patrol the streets checking bikes too, and when they find one that was not reported for repair in time, they call out Zhang Sheng and the other maintenance workers in the WeChat group.

Zhang Sheng does not look especially busy. He just has to keep watching his phone to be sure no new task has come down in the group.

Beijing is a place he has left and come back to twice. The most recent return was because his wife was about to give birth and has Rh-negative blood.

"A lot of the checkups can't be done in the county town, so we came back to Beijing."

ofo's rival Mobike runs its street maintenance much the same way. A little after 8 a.m., maintenance workers in orange-red vests reach the few streets they are responsible for. The first thing they do is send their location to their supervisor on WeChat to clock in. Every time they line the bikes up neatly or find a fault, they photograph it and report it to the group. Then a dispatch vehicle comes to the spot to haul away the broken and the surplus bikes.

Knowing how to use a smartphone is the most basic bar most internet companies set for gig workers, and often the only one. Their users call for service and place orders by phone. Their workers take the jobs by phone and follow the phone's navigation to the address. One 58 Home cleaner said that at her interview she had to prove to the interviewer that she could use map navigation.

Their time off is mostly spent on the phone as well. More than one worker said they download TV shows in advance to watch on breaks. Not everyone has time to finish a whole episode in one go.

The phone hands employers a great deal of information: not just ratings and order counts, but rule-breaking too.

Li Xiao delivers for UU Paotui, a service much like Shansong. He worked for Shansong before, but to earn more he registered several accounts and grabbed orders with all of them at once. When Shansong's back end caught it, it banned him outright. Now at UU Paotui, the app checks every day whether his phone has been online for a full eight hours.

Switching Jobs Isn't Hard, but They're All Much the Same

Li Xiao has tried five different gig jobs in the past year. Until the middle of 2016 he was still a ride-hailing driver.

He drove a car with an out-of-town plate, starting at 8 in the morning and knocking off at 9 or 10 at night. He picked up a few rides on Yidao on the side. It was hard work, but on his best days he cleared more than 500 yuan.

Then the rules changed in the second half of last year. On October 8, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen all published draft rules — or drafts for public comment — for ride-hailing. Each of the four cities raised the bar for private-hire cars on household registration, license plates and vehicle models.

Beijing and Shanghai, the two cities strictest about plates and hukou, both required local plates on the cars and local household registration for the drivers. Didi fought on for a few months, but neither city relented. Since March this year, Didi has stopped sending orders to cars without Beijing plates inside the Third Ring Road.

Li Xiao did not wait for that day. Didi's subsidies stopped quickly, and he decided renting a Beijing plate was not worth it. "A relative was kind enough to lend me a Beijing plate. But borrow it long enough and you have to pay them. Renting one on the market costs more than 2,000."

Li Xiao then bought a 2,000-yuan electric bike and started delivering parcels. He does not plan to do this forever either. He thinks the real money is in a fruit stall — on a good day, he has heard, seven or eight hundred yuan, even over a thousand. But, he added, "Beijing polices it hard, so you can only run that kind of business now and then."

After this year's Chinese New Year, Li Xiao sent his child, just turned seven, back to their hometown in Shanxi to start primary school, and has begun working out how to leave Beijing himself.

There's More Than One Didi Village

Somewhere to live is the first thing these workers need in Beijing. Most of them live in unremarkable single-story houses on Beijing's back streets or in villages tucked out of sight. Rent in those places usually runs 600 to 1,000 yuan a month, and each one tends to gather around one or two kinds of gig work.

The best known example, and the one closest to the map of China's internet industry, is "Didi Village." Its real name is Houchang Village, in Haidian District, strung along about four kilometers of road. Across from this urban village stands the Baidu building, and the Beijing headquarters of Lenovo, Tencent, Didi and others sit close by.

More than a thousand people from Pengshui County, Chongqing, live in Houchang Village. At first most of them were in the moving business, but the orders began drying up after 2008. In 2015, at the fiercest point of the Uber-Didi subsidy war, most of Houchang Village switched to driving for Didi.

A year or so later, Didi got hard to make money on, and many went back to moving furniture. In this urban village of about 15,000 square meters, trucks of every model are parked, some with the logos of 58 Home, Lalamove and other platforms stuck on them.

Outside the village, the residents of Houchang know little about the towers crowding the skyline nearby, or Xishan No. 1 Courtyard, where the average price runs as high as 80,000 yuan per square meter. One villager, asked where the Baidu building was, had no idea, although it stood only a few hundred meters away.

In the unremarkable corners and streets of this huge city, "villages" like Didi Village are hidden everywhere.

Guajiatun Village, next to the Peking University and Tsinghua University campuses, is a delivery village instead. Most of the buildings are low single-story houses with a long narrow corridor and rooms on either side; nearly every door and window is covered by a curtain made from a bedsheet or a duvet cover.

When our reporter arrived around 3 p.m., the alley was packed with shared bikes and delivery scooters — Meituan, Ele.me, Baidu Delivery, all of them — but there was no one outside taking the air.

Longtime Beijing residents who live here said they don't know these delivery workers. Staff at two neighborhood police offices in the alley told us that the riders usually don't finish until 8 or 9 at night, and that most no longer rent as a group; they rent single rooms separately and cluster together that way.

Master Gao was one of the few delivery workers still to be seen in the village; he happened to be back home swapping the battery on his electric bike. Rent plus utilities here costs him 1,000 yuan a month. He has been taking orders on Ele.me for six months, working mainly out of Silicon Valley Computer City near the southwest gate of Peking University, covering Zhongguancun, Peking University and Tsinghua.

Delivering around here, the danger is not only traffic accidents but traffic police. Master Gao said that riding against traffic on the road north of Haidian Bridge costs an electric bike a 50-yuan fine if you are caught; he has been caught once. With that he pushed his bike out in a hurry, back to his orders.

Working for Beijing, Without Living in It

Tang Bin, 23, is new to this world. Three months ago he went from welding steel, plastic and aluminum to following map navigation and bringing people their meals.

He had come to Beijing from his hometown of Yuncheng, Shanxi, and found a delivery job on Dianping: the restaurant company supplies the electric bike, base pay is 15 yuan an hour, plus 4 yuan per order. A good customer review is worth another 3 yuan. He gets four days off a month, and if he is willing to work overtime he can add another 150 yuan.

Tang Bin is still getting used to the job. "Mind your manners." "Handle the utensils gently." "Which compounds are hard to get into, so you have to go around." These are lessons from daily deliveries and training, and none of them came up when he was welding aluminum alloy.

Last month he finished first at his company for orders delivered and took home more than 5,000 yuan. He says it really isn't much more than he made back in Shanxi. In his months in Beijing, Tang Bin has not found a place of his own; he squeezes into a colleague's 20-square-meter rental. When the colleague's girlfriend comes over, he spends the night at an internet café.

Tang Bin's WeChat name is "Fendou Nuli" ("strive hard"), in the naming style of the QQ era; many of his coworkers also like to work words like "happy," "brave one" or "smile" into their handles. His Moments feed holds only a few shared links to the match-three game Xiaoxiaole, all posted before he came to Beijing.

"I report to the company at 9 every morning and work until 10 at night." After 2 p.m. there are about two hours when Tang Bin can sit in the shop, eat a boxed lunch, rest, and open iQiyi to watch Running Man China.

Three months in, Tang Bin sometimes worries about how to find a better-paid job. But most of the time what weighs on him is not work. It is that "everyone around me is married with kids, and I don't even have a girlfriend."

Tang Bin says he wanted to see the capital, and would like to use his weekend off to go and look at other parts of Beijing, but he can't find anyone to go with.

The way delivery work is organized leaves coworkers with little overlap, and the customers are people you see once. "At work I basically never come into contact with women," Tang Bin said. He doesn't count the few seconds of a customer's face at the door, or the word or two exchanged, as contact.

Work has become flexible, but that means little to him; he still fills every free hour with overtime. Three months into Beijing, the streets he knows best are still the few he delivers on.

Back home in Shanxi, Tang Bin found a girlfriend on Momo, though it didn't last long. Since coming to Beijing, he feels the odds of that happening again keep shrinking.

"Being alone in Beijing is really no fun." At the end of the interview, he typed that line into WeChat. After that delivery, we never saw him again.

Cover image from hksilicon

Apart from Sun Xiuyan and Guo Yi, all names in this article are pseudonyms at the interviewees' request. Special thanks to Zhu Ruomiao for contributing to the reporting.