Editor’s note: In April, footage of a 61-year-old passenger on the Beijing Subway abusing a curtain installer in dusty, paint-splattered clothes, saying that he “looked like a beggar,” began trending on Chinese social media. It sparked intense discussion on the treatment that tradespeople — often characterized by high-vis vests, hard hats, safety boots, and buckets stuffed with tools — receive on public transit.

Exhausted and covered in dust after a long day screeding floors with mortar, Qi Jianjun faces a dilemma as he boards the Shanghai Metro to return home — to sit or not to sit, that is the question.

He’s all too aware of the judgmental stares that construction workers like him can sometimes attract for “making a mess” on buses and in subway carriages.

The 53-year-old from Zhoukou, in the central Henan province, began working away from home seven years ago. His typical workday involves spending hours crouching down, one hand on his knee, body tilted as he reaches out to smooth freshly poured screed with a trowel. He uses his core strength to pull back his upper body before shuffling backward — a motion he needs to repeat hundreds of times.

Qi’s trousers are inevitably splashed as he mixes and pours the mortar, and any area not covered by his high-vis vest is thick with dust by noon.

After lunch, he takes a break lasting 30 minutes to an hour. With cement and sand covering almost every surface, and with no proper seating, he’ll find a relatively clean corner to lean against a wall or lie on the bare concrete floor.

He keeps his hair cropped short, except for a small tuft on top, which he recently dyed red, making it appear like a tiny volcano emerging from his scalp. However, as he often runs his cement-covered fingers across his head, the vibrant color is now tinged with white, chalky streaks.

Today, he finishes the last corner of the floor at 4 p.m. and steps outside to await the foreman’s inspection. After he gets the OK, he collects his pay for the day and heads to the nearest subway station to begin the long journey home.

The Shanghai Metro isn’t crowded at 4:30 p.m., and as Qi boards the train, he spots an empty seat and moves to sit down. But suddenly a voice stops him: “How can you sit down when you’re so dirty?”

Looking up, he sees a middle-aged woman in the next seat sizing him up — and for a moment, anger flares inside him. Rising at 4 a.m., he’d spent the entire day on the floor, leaving him with an aching back and legs. It was going to take him another 90 minutes to get home, and he wanted to rest. But the woman’s gaze suggested an inevitable argument, so he instead sat on the floor under the handrail by the doors.

Some passengers came to his defense, telling the woman that she had no right to decide who got to sit down, but Qi remained where he was. He simply didn’t have the energy, and as he was covered head to foot in dust, he felt that she had a point.

“People are wearing clean clothes. It wouldn’t be right to accidentally get dirt on them,” he reasons after the incident, pointing out that at least the woman hadn’t used abusive language. Had she resorted to insults, Qi says that he would have struggled to stay silent.

It was the first time he’d experienced such blatant discrimination. Usually, those who are uncomfortable with him sitting down next to them just move somewhere else.

Liu Xuejun, a 67-year-old volunteer on the Beijing Subway, says manual laborers traveling home from work generally stand or sit on the floor of carriages even when seats are available. He recalls once helping an elderly laborer carrying a large bag who was gripping the handrail and swaying, his eyes closed seemingly from exhaustion, yet still he was reluctant to sit down for fear of dirtying the seats.

Sometimes Liu will provide workers with tissues, suggesting that if they are concerned, they can always wipe their seat down before getting off the train. Few take him up on the offer.

The Shanghai Metro Passenger Code states that only people who are “barefoot, shirtless, in oil-stained clothing, drunk and disorderly, have an acute infectious disease, or mentally ill and without a guardian” are barred from entering stations or boarding trains. Otherwise, there are no rules on dress code.

However, sitting on the floor is a violation of the safety regulations. “If there are standing passengers and the train suddenly brakes, sitting on the ground can be dangerous,” one station employee in Shanghai explains, adding that staff members are instructed to ask any passengers found sitting on the carriage floor to stand and hold the handrail.

This leaves manual workers who need to commute in dusty clothes in a bind: they can either take a seat and potentially face the ire of fellow passengers, sit on the floor and risk injury, or stay on their weary feet throughout the journey.

Coming out in the wash

Part of the problem stems from the lack of washing facilities at construction sites. Floor screeding, Qi’s specialty, typically follows electrical and plumbing installation, when a property is still a bare shell — no doors, toilet, or shower, with only cold water for rinsing tools, mixing plaster, and other work purposes.

This is not only the case with private home renovations but also with factories, schools, restaurants, and office buildings. Bricklayers, welders, plumbers, and many other tradespeople who have spent decades in the construction industry say they have never once showered at a worksite.

An employee at a home renovation company in Hengyang, in the central Hunan province, reveals that even if a property has showers or toilets, many owners won’t allow the workers to use them.

As a casual worker, Qi is paid by the hour and needs to stay on site until the work is finished. He regularly rises before 4 a.m. to hit the labor market as early as possible, and sometimes has to endure 12-hour days. With jobs scattered across the city, and no place to wash or change clothes, he has no choice but to board the subway in his dusty overalls.

On larger construction sites, workers are often put up in dormitories with shared facilities. These are usually placed quite far from the worksite for health and safety reasons.

Before returning to his hometown in the eastern Anhui province in May, bricklayer Cao Daoyin was part of a 2,000-strong crew building a factory on the outskirts of Shanghai. It took at least 20 minutes to reach his dorm from the worksite.

He says that, to speed up the project, the contractor would hire casual workers for 10 to 20 days at a time. Although living off site, they also had access to the dorm washrooms. Yet, as the wait for the shower room on evenings was usually over an hour, most would just head straight to the nearest subway station or bus stop at the end of their shift.

Construction projects in downtown areas of major cities can be even more challenging. Due to limited space, sites will have few or no dorms for workers to stay overnight. Some even have no lockers, with workers having to store water bottles, tools, and clean clothes in plastic bags on the ground, among the dust and construction debris.

Some companies will rent off-site accommodation for their workers. However, as prices are high in city centers — for example, a room for six people in central Beijing or Shanghai costs about 4,000 yuan ($560) a month — it’s common that they will be housed much further out, forcing those without cars and electric bikes to rely on public transportation.

Recently, Chen Jiang has been working as a welder on a project near Shanghai’s central West Nanjing Road while staying at a place 6 kilometers away in the northern Yangpu District. With no dorm facilities on site, he can only shower after returning to his temporary digs.

In his bright yellow hard hat and high-vis vest, he nightly boards a Line 12 train after work, always standing in the same spot — the connection area between carriages, furthest from the seats. Discussing the incident in Beijing that went viral in April, he quipped, “We’re all working people; if they’re so superior, they should purchase their own subway.”

Lasting marks

It’s 4 a.m. and the labor market in Shanghai’s suburban Songjiang District is already bustling. Qi parks his e-bike by the roadside and joins the crowds of people looking to secure a salary for the day. As dawn breaks, workers climb into trucks with contractors one by one, but Qi fails to land a job.

“Time to go home and do laundry,” he says at 7 a.m., mounting his bike. He lives about a 10-minute ride away in a two-story residential building shared by more than 10 families. His first-floor room covers roughly 10 square meters and has its own bathroom.

Back at home, he pulled out his dirty workwear from a shoulder bag. Cement’s water-activated hardening properties make it essential in construction, but it’s difficult to wash out after it seeps into clothing and solidifies. After about three days, it hardens completely, leaving stubborn gray-white marks that resist even vigorous scrubbing.

If he’s not too exhausted from working overtime, Qi will shower and wash his clothes as soon as he gets home from a shift.

He has two sets of work clothes that he wears in rotation, both comprising a cheap T-shirt and a pair of pants, which he replaces each summer. He prefers colors that hide dirt, such as green camouflage patterns, deep purples, or black. Outside of work, he likes to wear vibrant orange and pink outfits, along with black dress shoes, which stand in sharp contrast to his regular safety boots. His wardrobe is neatly organized, with his clothes all neatly folded and sorted by color.

Even when it’s possible to wash clothes at a construction site, it’s not convenient. Washing machines cost about 5 yuan for 20 minutes, but bricklayer Cao says most workers will wash by hand to save money.

On an average workday, from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., Cao will lay nearly 1,300 bricks. During breaks, he rests wherever he can — on bricks or wooden boards — but nowhere is clean. “If you can lean on it, it’s a seat,” he says, adding that on top of the dust, his clothes are soaked in sweat by the end of the day. “We wash and change once a day.”

Except for high-vis vests, which the construction companies provide, laborers are responsible for buying their own workwear. Cao usually gets his clothes from street vendors around the worksite, but the poor quality and frequent washing mean they fall apart within two or three months.

Shoes can be even harder to clean. Cao shows his freshly scrubbed boots, where cement has filled the textured pattern on the toes and sides. They look like they have just been pulled from wet concrete.

“Who wouldn’t want to be clean? It’s just that our environment doesn’t allow for it,” explains a laborer from northeastern Heilongjiang province who’s been working in fire protection systems in Shanghai.

Dignity is not defined by one’s occupation. What stands between China’s construction laborers and cleanliness is the endless dust, the long hours, and the lack of rest areas and adequate washing facilities. These factors might contribute to their appearance on public transportation, but not to their character or place in society.

(Due to privacy concerns, Qi Jianjun, Chen Jiang, and Wang Hui are pseudonyms.)

Reported by Liu Lingguo with contributions from The Paper staff.

A version of this article originally appeared in The Paper. It has been translated and edited for brevity and clarity, and is republished here with permission.

Translator: Chen Yue; editors: Wang Juyi and Hao Qibao.

(Header image: Visuals from E+ and 500px/VCG, reedited by Sixth Tone)