The boss is trapped in Europe. They have won new orders from their American consumers in months.
It’s a company that desperately seeks to keep the lamps on.
“So far, we haven’t won any really extensive mass production orders to keep the plant running, to pay wages and to stay afloat,” Yuliya Yakubova told me. She’s been direct about the company he runs.
Speaking from Italy, he said: “The last thing I have to do is fire or fire employees.” But he doesn’t have much left.
Lotus United is a company that stands firm. In a shopping park in Jiangsu, near the east coast of China, it makes rails and shelves for where some of you go. Or at least it was.
Two production floors, about a hundred workers, were reduced to a handful of workers each day.
Most machines are turned off, boxes stacked, rust piles on the floor.
Huang Xuefeng is very busy. Before we met, there were some sparks in a corner. The white glow of the weld in a workbench.
But the disastrous closure through the virus has reduced this company to a handful of workers, hidden in a corner.
Huang had a 50% pay cut. Now spend a little over $200 ($160) a month.
“The cash I earn now can only guarantee a fundamental life,” he said. His circle of relatives hit hard because his wife also works at the factory.
They are a tiny, tiny part of China’s vast wave of migrant workers.
When I met him, they were having lunch in combination for a 25-minute break.
If the company goes bankrupt, you will lose your salary and lose your lunch. There won’t be anything to send the house to your daughter. “I arrived here in 2012. [She] grew up at home because I can’t.
Private corporations like Lotus create the most of new jobs in China. But they are vulnerable in this crisis.
In recent years the government and the Communist Party has been more focused on consolidating and protecting state-owned enterprises: the industrial, transport, telecoms and financial giants that they own.
Add to that the over-reliance of small businesses to do business in the U.S., they have American consumers, and it’s transparent that Lotus is very, very vulnerable. A hundred jobs are at stake.
A closure of the unemployment crisis is a nightmare for China’s leaders. The ruling Communist Party is involved in the effects on social stability.
Small visual protests erupted in Wuhan in April. Workers at a grocery shopping mall piled up to protest against rents they simply can’t afford anymore.
The total official unemployed in Chinese cities has already met the government’s goal. There are independent forecasts that you can pass much higher.
China’s second-largest politician, Prime Minister Li Keqiang, declared the magnitude of the challenge last month when he said, “The fact is that until April, the figure is already 6% matrix … Employment is the biggest fear in people’s lives. It is of the utmost importance to all families.”
Addressing corporations like Lotus, Li said: “Many export corporations no longer have orders now, which has greatly affected their employees.
“We want all those other people and companies in difficulty, but at most, we want to help them get a job.”
But there’s an organization that’s afraid of the party: graduates.
Nearly one million graduates enter the Chinese labor market this summer.
There’s less work to be done. Li admitted that the prospects for them are “dark.”
Speaking at a recruiting fair in Shanghai, Zhang, 23, said, “Yes, we have pressure. We can’t locate a task, but we don’t need to stay home and do nothing either.”
She’s pessimistic. “I hope it probably won’t increase in a year.”
Many task fairs have been put online. Graduates look at the camera of a phone with a mask in the hope of getting their first big task. “We don’t revel in internships and don’t move on to the fall homework fair,” Zhang said.
In China’s past, the government gave them work. But it’s been a long time.
Provincial governments and state-owned enterprises must recruit graduates. Tax exemptions are proposed.
This is a factor for economic recovery and political legitimacy. Young, educated, unemployed, restless and green graduates with envy have continually been a challenge for the ruling party.
Back at the factory, Italy, Ms. Yakubova has her head held high. “I hope that after one, two, I don’t know, 3 months, let’s say in the near future, that we can restart.”
Some staff members have already resigned to locate the election work. The minimum wage to which they were forced to pay them was not enough.
Huang and his wife stay, but they have a plan. “We’re under a lot of pressure to live here,” he said. “The rent, the livingArray charge … If we can’t hold on, we’ll go.”
They will return north if jobs prevent it and the corn and wheat manufacturers again.
Millions of migrants like them can do the same. It would be an unforeseen reversal of China’s vast urbanization for decades.