Discussion keeps the world turning.
This is Roundtable. If you ever lived in an urban community in China, you likely have seen business cars stock on your tour introducing to you gik-services like plumbers, electricians, babysitters, and elderly care.
In recent years, the concept, as well as supply and demand of gik-savours, have evolved dramatically, and many cities across China have improved their service stations accordingly.
Hello, I'm Limeing, and this is Roundtable.
Today, with Yushan and Steve Hathley, we find out what's new about gik-savours stations and how best we can make use of them.
I'm not sure about Steve, but Yushan, you must have seen this.
A business car carrying telephone numbers and introducing to you all kinds of services, climbing, electrician.
I mean, at times, in most cases, we find them an use-sense, but in case of an emergency, like a light bulb goes off, they can be a lifesaver.
I mean, most of these people, or people who provide services, they walk around in communities and put their name cards just on doors by doors and just stick it into your window, just a little slit or something to tell you that, okay, this is my number, and I offer all kinds of services as such.
And to me, it's just as normal as seeing the sunrise ever since I live in China, which is...
My many years in Korea, I didn't see it in China because I've just moved, but moving from house to house in Korea, I saw it a lot.
At one time, in particular, I was very thankful for it.
I came home one evening after a friend's birthday party, and it was about 12.30 at night.
And my apartment door code included the number zero, so it was a press code thing.
All the numbers worked, but the zero had stopped working.
I could not get into my apartment.
Underneath my door, a door pad, the secret code pad, was a sticker with a telephone number.
Said, if you have any troubles with your locks, call this number.
I did. It was 12.30 at night.
He arrived in 15 minutes and fixed the door handle, and I was able to get into my apartment.
The gig economy working in my favor.
Are you sure he wasn't the guy who sabotaged the device?
He very well have been. But I'm so good for him.
He deserved the money. Joking aside, I mean, it's sometimes very helpful to have somebody standing by in your community, and we have seen such service stations in our community for quite some time.
And apparently, times have changed, and the services that they provide also need to change, which is why in many cities across China, there's the talk of building gig service stations.
And what are they doing on top of the existing service stations?
And what's new about them?
I mean, I like the idea that they're gathering these individuals as a group, or such a union or community that we call gig service stations these days.
And apart from just offering services, it's like a channel or a system of things that's build, well, mostly online to release info, provide services for people to see what kind of services are offered, and also for these employees to find the closest service requirements near them.
And it is an estimate by China Youth Daily, which indicates that as for now, 24 provinces in cities, including major cities, such as Shanghai and Beijing, and also central provinces like Hu Be Hunan, and Northeastern provinces like Helum Zhang, or Lownang, or just all of our provinces in cities, all of our China, they all include gig service stations in the construction of the employment
public service system.
Can I ask, sorry, to interrupt you?
So a gig service station is a physical location, like a community center, where you can visit there, and if I'm providing my gig service, then I can leave my information there to be found by other people.
And if I'm looking for a plumber or an electrician or whatever, I can visit this community center, this gig station, and I can find that service provided there.
Well, the plumber and electricians, more often than not, would have their business cars attest to your door.
Whereas when you are going to these gig stations, like I did a few years ago, I would go, they're looking for, let's say, a cleaner.
Somebody to have my kitchen cleaned, to have a new apartment cleaned after decoration, or I would be looking for a babysitter, or somebody who would look after the elderly in my family, that kind of thing.
So it's more relatively more stable.
It's also catered to personal use, right?
Because I heard people are also getting drops, such as accompanying other people to a hospital.
We're taking care of older people in the house, while their children are out working.
When you walk into the center, is there like a board, with people's cards, or do you approach a staff member and say, I'm looking for a babysitter, and then they tap into their computer, and they find someone for you.
How does the process work?
In the experience I had, I talked to a staff member who had the contacts of various people who left them their contact.
So that's how it's done.
And also in the example that you should mention earlier, of people accompanying you to a hospital, and guiding you every step of the way, and making appointments, and guiding you to different examinations, and talking to the doctors, you can find them on shopping platforms as well.
I have, personally, have someone or an talk about that I would hope that I don't need to talk to.
And for providing the services, it doesn't really have to be physical and offline.
You don't really need to be there physically to request it, because we'll take the sub-provincial city of Shaman in South-Eastern China's Fujian province as an example.
So this is according to recent report by Shaman Daily, that the city launched the construction of an integrated online and offline gig job market at the end of 2023, which has already put into trial operation earlier this year, since March.
So they launched such a mini-program via China's Instant Messaging app WeChat.
So through day-to-day chatting app that's in line with a mini-function, which everybody uses.
Yeah, of course. I mean, for people outside of China, they don't necessarily use it, but here is how we do it.
So we use WeChat, and we click it, and we found the mini-program that we're talking about.
And through the mini-app, there's these functions, and the feature provided for everybody, either you're a job seeker, or you're just looking for services to hire.
So we can also gain access to such information through online channels as well.
Okay, so that makes it just easy to find.
You can do it online, you can do it offline.
So whichever is more comfortable for you, I suppose.
Okay, so why then such the move to create all of these new gig stations, I wonder?
I mean, the movement benefits not only the large population of part-time workers, and so that these individuals, they don't have to go door by door to slip their name card.
Now they have these unions, they quote unquote union, or community, where they can just look for jobs that they need.
Also, this works perhaps even better for full-time mothers, or people who, like migrant workers, who can't really stay in one place for too long for a long-term job position, like they can just locate a nearby job requirement through the app, and also through the online maps that's provided through the mini-app as well.
So for these people, and this is according to Shaman Daily as well, this group of migrant workers and also just gig job providers is growing day by day as well.
Oh, they're derizing demand.
Yeah, with such a rising demand, such a gathered info provider is just helping them to find jobs easier.
Also, the type of services being provided at the gig's service stations have somehow changed.
I can only speak for my personal experience, and that is when I want to look for a cleaner, when I want to look for a babysitter, I would turn to them, because there's a certain level of authority, because we think that the staff members there will be vetting the member, the people who give them their contact, I was going to ask you where, what they are best at.
I was going to ask if there was any concern, because when you go to a gig center or a community center, then you don't know the people.
No, I don't know the people.
Right, so you're hiring kind of blind, if you will, but there's some sort of vetting system in place to make sure that the person who you're hiring, they've been checked out.
Right, and the kind of service also exists online as well, a certain metropolitan-based lifestyle applications like Wubah, Wubah Tuncheon, or what's the other platform I can't recall.
But there are multiple platforms where people go on and post their job information, also their own talent information, and the platform itself, sometimes, in fact, I wouldn't say it's time-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom
quality service, if you want somebody higher to come to your doorstep to take care of an elderly member of the family, and there's the vetting process.
You can talk to the sales assistant or the staff member of the platform, and they would know the quality of the service that the person they are recommending possesses.
And in that case, also, if you aren't not happy with the service that the person is in your home, and you can talk to the sales person of the platform, and complying and perhaps demand that he or she be replaced by somebody else.
So interesting you mentioned that because I was looking up the gig economy in different parts of the world to see how significant it was and what type of experience employees, gig workers were having.
And I found a story from the BBC from November of 2022, and it was University researchers from Bristol and Oxford University, and they found that review platforms are leaving these gig economy workers at the mercy of custody.
So the example they gave was about food delivery, where if you provide a service such as food delivery, and the customer is not happy with the service that you provided, they will leave a nasty review for you, and this can affect your employment status in the future.
And that wasn't just from England, they did interviews in New York in San Francisco in Los Angeles and in Manila in the Philippines as well.
And what they found through their research was that a lot of gig workers were putting in extra hours, even unpaid sometimes, and doing jobs for free because of the fear of the review left by an unhappy customer.
That's one of the, there are many, many, many, many advantages to gig working, but that's one of the downsides of it in this, in this day and age.
The issue was much more prevalent at the beginning of the internet age or the mobile internet age here in China.
I'm talking about perhaps more than a decade ago when people started using mobile applications on platforms like damping, damping is a platform where people rate and review restaurants and other locations they go to, and then there's, what's the other platform, most, and the movie reviews that kind of thing.
So there was a time when people were pretty much preoccupied with their ratings, and they would go the extra mile to, to try and persuade their clients and customers to give them a higher rating.
Now the situation is not as salient in most cases, because the kind of service that people employ on a daily basis is so many that I don't think any individual client is powerful enough.
No, I don't think any individual, yeah, that, that part is also true, because there's so many people using that service, but again, individuals are using so many online services for selected by individuals, delivery man or cleaners, that they don't, they don't necessarily have the time to rate each and every individual service.
The rating has somehow been overrated, and it's only in very specific services, like when a gig last four months or several months, or particular restaurants or services that you go to, it's not as rampant as it used to be.
But I think this is a very interesting phenomena, if you draw the international comparison.
The gig economy, it's big all around the world, and like I said, I gave an example of a disadvantage, but there's plenty of examples of advantages, not only for the workers, but for businesses alike to be involved in the gig economy.
Convenience that IC or benefits that IC, it's brought on the people who require services, because a lot of these, now whether we're back to talking about the Chinese scenario here, a lot of these gig job markets were stations, they're community based, where it's a small circle of community, where service is kind of centralized through all provided through the similar,
one team through the station.
And here the services provided are kind of similar, like people just care giving to old people for the community that has a lot of elder populations.
And in the future, they talk about getting more people trained and ready for a bigger service line as well.
The way I see it, the longer you do in such service, and the more professional you'll get, and the better rating you will get eventually.
And that's how I see a lot of these stations are operating these days, like they're also hiring while providing trainings for these people.
And that's the benefit that IC, because not only do people receive convenient services on the community level, which are physically close to them, but also these drop seekers, they're getting trained to be capable of doing more jobs as well.
Yeah, which is one of the great advantages of gig working, right?
One of the disadvantages is lack of job security in the future, you never know what's going to be available and what's not going to be available.
But if you're a young person looking to get into the job market, but you don't exactly know what you want to do just yet, you don't want to lock yourself into one particular path.
And then working in the gig economy is a wonderful option because you can get training.
You could do training and working in one field and then do training and working in another field the next day if you wanted until you find what you like.
And then conversely for the elderly too, you know, I think gig working, it's flexible.
You can pick your own schedule and even during one particular day you can work in the morning, afternoon or evening if you want, depending on the job.
There are a lot of advantages to this.
There are often stigma attached to gig jobs because of this lack of stability.
But one thing that we tend to neglect that is that not everybody doing a gig worker is at a disadvantage in what they do.
In fact, there are quite a few high end jobs and quite modern and competitive jobs that in which people are choosing intentionally to freelance and to work part time.
Voice over artists like you and then interpreting jobs.
I mean, that's not something anybody can do.
And then now in the age of AI, there are artists who work with them that with themselves offering their service on shopping platforms, trying helping people generate images, you know, working with AI artificial intelligence technology technologies to generate images and videos.
So that's not something that anybody can master is high skill and it's not as stable as we want it to be.
It's not a nine to five job, but sometimes it can pay handsomely.
Well, sometimes it can pay more than a nine to five, which is why people get involved with it in the first place.
Again, to give another example internationally, I found a story from the World Bank from September of last year because I wanted to know globally speaking, how big is the gig economy in terms of a global economic factor.
According to the World Bank, the gig economy accounts for up to 12% of the global labor market.
It's probably higher, I think, than we expected that number to be, right?
Really important for developing countries too.
The gig economy, this report was called working without borders, the promise and peril of online gig work.
And it found that the demand in developing countries is growing at a really fast rate, for example, in Sub-Saharan Africa, job postings on the largest digital platform in that part of the world, grew by 130%.
Whereas in North America, for example, the growth was just 14%.
And almost 60% of firms surveyed in some poorer countries reported a big increase in outsourcing to gig workers.
This is proof that it is a global factor.
And 12% of the global labor market comes from the gig economy.
That's true. And let's come back to the discussion about gig jobs stations or gig service stations.
I mean, what's the point of having and building upon existing service stations, brick and mortar service stations, when in fact we have a lot of platforms existing in the cypress space.
Like the ones I mentioned earlier, I mean, shopping platforms where people go and sell their servers, bringing people to the hospitals.
I mean, they can be very professional.
They know which doctor is good at treating what illness they know when they're available, that kind of thing.
And they know their way around the hospitals.
They wouldn't be, you wouldn't lose your way with one of them working with you.
So there are very high. And then there's the people working with artificial intelligence.
There's a vast number of jobs and then high quality jobs facilitated by the internet.
And what's the point of building upon existing brick and mortar service stations?
What's the advantage and what's the necessity of having them at all?
Yeah, why bother having a physical location at all?
Well, it sounds to me that such physical or offline service stations that's not just for younger people, but for older job seekers as well.
Because not all of these gig job or, let's say, service providers, they are young enough to master all the AI, the technologies, the online links and everything.
They just want a safe paid job or a part-time job that can help them to fulfill their daily needs.
So for them, such communities or such stations can provide a legal protection for them.
And they even give them the means to purchase, say insurance, work insurance, or accident providing, preventing insurance, et cetera, as far as I've been reading so far.
So it sounds to me that it's such in protecting umbrella for these job seekers so that they don't really have to necessarily go individually and slip name cards anymore.
That's one fair explanation.
I mean, there are still people in demand of brick and mortar service stations.
Yeah, exactly. And also peace of mind, right?
When you're doing things online, I think it's still a lot of people wonder, is this trustworthy?
Or is this not? I don't exactly understand this 100%.
Let me go to the actual location and speak to an employee.
Then I can have a little bit more comfort when making my decision about who I'm hiring.
Once you can put a face to the person you're talking to, you find it easy to trust the person.
Exactly. Have you guys contributed to the gig economy, I wonder?
Have you ever had a job in your life where you were part of the 12% global statistic?
That was the name card inserting campaign.
Oh, were you really? When I was back in college, like I wanted to earn my own student education fee during college.
So I did like English training for primary school kids because I major in English.
So yeah, I mean, why not?
So I actually knock on doors and one family hired me and it was handsomely paid back then to just do it individually and get the job and teaching English.
I just enjoy the little attempt of bravery of knocking on their doors.
Very nice. I share that experience.
I was once one of the member of the business cart in Zerting and lesion.
As a post grad as an undergraduate student, I work a summer job selling and promoting supplements in downtown Shanghai.
And then as a post graduate student, I work at this as a substitute student in a university in sub-open Bay J.
Student teacher. Yeah.
How was that experience?
I'm curious. It was good human contact because you know, when you're in your university, you only talk to your classmates, your teachers.
You don't necessarily have a wide range of people that are in your contact.
And it was nice traveling to the suburb of Beijing.
And then during the ride, talking to other friends who are substituting there and also to talk to the students who are some of them are eager to learn and some of them are, you know, they don't really.
Yeah, it was amazing these days.
Like I was in college back then, but my student is only a primary school kid whom I assume is just a random primary school kid.
In many ways, they know more about what's going on and what's the news was trendy than you.
And the way they talk to you is like, okay, you're just a higher teacher.
So I can do whatever I want with you and play play tricks and all that.
They're cute. And at the end of the day, they finish what you tell them to do, but it's still quite an experience outside of school.
I also contributed to the gig economy when I was in middle school.
I was hired during the summertime to rake blueberries, which paid the minimum wage in Canada at that time.
And it was probably the most difficult job I've ever had in my life.
Blueberries grow on a bush, which is very close to the ground, which means that you have to bend down close to the ground using this rake kind of tool to gather the blueberries.
Not only that was difficult, bees and wasps and hornets are a big fan of fruit as it turns out.
I got stung a lot. The number one most torturous thing about that job was that after staring at blueberries all day every day, when you go to sleep at night and you close your eyes, take a guess what you see.
Blueberries? Absolutely.
That's not a kind of dream.
Blueberries are so long after that.
But jokes aside, all of the examples that we gave, none of us were full time employees at a company.
But yet we all were able to gain money by doing some work and we also were contributing to the economy, doing those gig works.
Very valuable experience being gathered, working with other people.
And one last thing that I would like to get your opinions on is it's costly and it's a lot of work.
And it might also weigh on the talent and skill of the people running these service stations.
I mean, I don't think there's enough talent with the HR skills or the other communication skills to fulfill all the service stations.
With that in mind, what other advantage and what other ways can we make the best use of service stations at that cost?
At that particular cost, that's a heavy question, isn't it?
I think more training. And you should mention that training is now available and training is not only available for the workers, but also available for the people who are running those stations.
And I think starting there would be a good spot to tackle that problem.
Yeah, also trying to think of training as well, because as long as you are equipped with such capability, it's fine that you're providing services.
There you go. That's all the time we have for our discussion.
And today, if you haven't heard enough from Roundtable, remember that you can always find us at Roundtable China or any platform you listen.
Thank you for listening.
Bye bye.
