Every morning between 6 and 9, one to two thousand people gather at Majuqiao, a township in Beijing's Tongzhou district that has become one of the capital's best-known day-labor markets. Bosses drive in, look the crowd over, and pick. On a typical morning, a third of the crowd — often less — gets taken to a job. The rest go home, or wait again tomorrow.

The creator of the channel Tante de Kelebing (忐忑的可乐饼） went there and spent a long conversation with one worker: born in 1992, from Luoyang in Henan province, elementary-school education. He arrived in Beijing around 2009, worked years as a courier for heavy parcels, and drifted to Majuqiao in 2021. His account is a ground-level ledger of how China's most physical labor market actually runs.

The pay ladder

Day labor here is priced by how much of your body the job consumes.

At the bottom is the general site handyman — the job the site loudspeakers advertise year-round at ¥180 (about $25) for an 8-to-9-hour day of following orders and carrying whatever needs carrying.

Above that sits parcel sorting and heavy loading: 12-hour rotating shifts at roughly ¥360 a day, wrestling packages of 35–40 kilos until, as he puts it, you walk home bent at the waist.

At the top is contract stair-carrying — hauling cement, sand, and steel channel up stairwells, priced by the load or the truck. That can pay ¥400 a day and up. In the good years, including during the pandemic, a strong carrier could make ¥700–900 in a day, and over ¥1,000 if he pushed into overtime.

Those years are gone. Competition has thickened: now a worker typically gets fewer than 20 days of work a month, at ¥200–300 a day, which averages out to roughly ¥150–170 a day across the month.

The top-paying work bills you later. After a day of carrying cement and sand up stairs, he says, the next morning your whole body locks up. Going downstairs you grip the handrail with both hands and haul your own legs over each step. Sitting down can trigger cramps.

The cost of waiting

Even idle days cost money. The cheapest noodles and the cheapest bunk in a shared rental still run at least ¥50 a day — money out the door before you have earned anything. String together a few jobless days and the buffer is gone.

That arithmetic explains the sleeping arrangements the video is named for. Some men store their bedding with acquaintances during the day and sleep on the roadside at night. Others pitch simple tents by the river or in parks — out to work by day, back to the tent by night. A few are simply drunks who pass out where they fall.

The rare success story he can point to: a man who landed a long, stable contract, saved real money, and went home to buy a freight truck with a loan and run his own transport. In Majuqiao terms, that is making it.

When degrees meet cement bags

One of the video's most striking confirmations: graduates of 211-project universities — China's upper tier — now show up at this market, taking short factory gigs and day work as a stopgap when nothing better has come through. Even outsourced contractors for state giants like PetroChina recruit here, offering ¥240–260 a day with food and lodging for installation work — though those posts may demand a diploma, or at least the ability to read basic English signage.

And then there is the work where a degree is worth exactly nothing: a hundred-plus bags of cement, three hundred bags of sand. There, the only credential is strength.

Everyone also works the second, digital market — refreshing recruitment apps like Yupaowang and Yigongjia between the roadside waits.

"We don't tell them back home"

He never complains to his family. Life out here is chaotic and hard, he says, and telling them would only hand them worry they can do nothing about.

What he insists on, at the end, is the dignity of the trade. Back in his hometown, a man with his education has almost no route to a respectable income. In Beijing, his strength converts directly into cash that supports a family. It is not a good life by the standards of the office towers across the city. But it is a life he can hold upright, paid for with his own two hands.

— Terry, Airgrix