Chinese workers are being urged to adopt a new role model: the “stick stick men” of Chongqing.

Stick stick men, who are also called stick soldiers, are itinerant, pole-bearing laborers hired to tote heavy loads up and down the city’s steep hills, ranging from luggage to electronic appliances. It’s bitter, grueling work, all the more so because Chongqing is known as one of the country’s “three furnaces,” home to some of the country’s hottest and most humid summers.

But this week on a visit to Chongqing, just days before Labor Day, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang exhorted the country’s toiling masses to adopt the “stick stick spirit.”