Chinese authorities say overtime '996' policy is illegal

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinese-authorities-say-overtime-996-policy-is-illegal-2021-08-27/

by hkmaxpro • 5 years ago

393 299 5 years ago

the_cramer• 5 years ago

I once had a chinese colleague who came to europe for a few years. She always thought we were lazy for working so short and every argument i brought up about mental health and work efficiency was met with a: "but it works for us".

What i did not understand back then is the absolute replaceability of personel in the chinese market. You work long and hard or tomorrow someone else does it.

Not only is this a big reason of the economical prowess of china in my opinion, i fear that this work-ethic will come back sooner or later to europe to "stay competitive".

In the face of bankcruptcy or market pressure... managers tend to make irrational and/or unethical decisions. And they will find a way to circumvent the laws. I am also sure that chinese companies will find a way to circumvent the 996 ruling here.

pizza234• 5 years ago

There's a documentary that shows exactly this phenomenon, American Factory.

i fear that this work-ethic will come back sooner or later to europe to "stay competitive"

I'm a bit more optimistic. In a culture where productivity is not the be-all and end-all, staying competitive at the cost one's whole life, will not take roots. I think that productivity also has different dimensions, which helps.

secondaryacct3• 5 years ago

What europeans like me who want to try something else do is simple: we emigrate to China and see how it is.

We dont all need to all do the same thing, and the biggest fallacy of all is that we re in competition with each other. We trade more or less efficiently but since doors are always half open, heh, just jump if you want.

Can even change with age.

mschuster91• 5 years ago

Not only is this a big reason of the economical prowess of china in my opinion, i fear that this work-ethic will come back sooner or later to europe to "stay competitive".

We rather will introduce tariffs to fight against price dumping. We have the mechanism for that and politicians are slowly waking up and realizing that China is an enemy that must be fought.

stephen_g• 5 years ago

Why would it come back? I don’t think any research has ever shown that working those kind of hours in “knowledge work” is sustainable or conducive to high productivity long-term.

I expect the “replaceability” that you mention isn’t just “work long and hard or somebody else will”, but also “work long and hard, because you can be easily replaced as soon as you have a breakdown”…

tandem5000• 5 years ago

It's an instance of Prisoner's dilemma.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

simonh19• 5 years ago

They've swallowed an ideological fallacy that simply working your pants off for long hours means you will win. The USSR had the same disease, if they just worked their people 20% harder than the west did then they would inevitably be more productive and economically 'win'. It's variation of the lump of labour fallacy.

Don't fall for it. It's thinking like this that leads to managers optimising for the wrong metrics. Hours worked is clearly the wrong metric. Companies don't exist to simply employ workers for long hours, and thinking that way leads you down the wrong path right from the start. You need to look at where the value actually comes from, and this is sometimes subtle and not at all obvious.

Here's a challenge. A taxi driver in London earns about 4x what a taxi driver in Beijing does, in objective international value terms. Why? What factors might lead to that difference? If your value system can't answer that question, then it's wrong. They do quite legitimately earn 4x as much because the work they are doing is worth 4x as much, and there must be a reason.

pjc507• 5 years ago

the work they are doing is worth 4x as much

This is a purchasing power parity argument; moving people around in London is "worth" more because they have more money, and money that is more valuable on the global exchange rate market.

lozenge3• 5 years ago

Careful now - why does a cosmetic surgeon in London s exclusive Harley Street earn £1,000,000 while a doctor restoring sight and correcting cleft palate and fistula in Africa earns 5% as much? Do you think their work is worth less?

solaarphunk2• 5 years ago

They earn 4x more because the world is not truly flat, and there are artificial/natural barriers which hamper competition such as; movement of humans, scarcity of taxi medallions along with fixed pricing, input costs of a taxi ride (cost of living, gasoline + subsidies/taxes), labor laws etc.

rvba2• 5 years ago

USSR was never efficient. People literally did not care about their jobs. Especially after stalinism ended, many did the absolute minimum. Since everything was state owned it was owned by nobody - so nobody cared about maintenance, workers often stole from their companies, did not show to work because they stood in queues..

They had sayings like: "doesnt matter if you lie or stand,you will get 3 thousand at the end" (what meant that there were no rewards for those who worked harder).

There could have been some islands of efficiency (perhaps in closed cities where workers could get accused of being spies if they didnt try hard enough) but for generic workers efficiency did not matter.

And I dont even write about inefficiencies of central planned system itself, where rewards did not come from market forces + falsified statistics on top, so nobody even knew the truth.

Even the communists knew that their system is inefficient, which you can see in many places. For example in "aquarium" novel by Suvorov one of the spies talks how they run out of meat and bread, but the system got so inefficient that it run out of people to murder.

USSR didnt work people harder. Political prisoners yes, but the normal people were incredibly ineffective. Even films made during communism laughed at that.

the-dude• 5 years ago

Baumol's cost disease : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

rocknor5• 5 years ago

They do quite legitimately earn 4x as much because the work they are doing is worth 4x as much

A London taxi driver is not paid more because his work is somehow more valuable than a Beijing taxi driver's, it's just because everything in London is expensive. That's just basic economics. Read an economics book.

How did everything in London get so expensive? Read a history book about the last few centuries.

Seems like you're just some typical western chauvinist with no real argument.

logicchains2• 5 years ago

What i did not understand back then is the absolute replaceability of personel in the chinese market. You work long and hard or tomorrow someone else does it.

That's rapidly changing as the birthrate is falling and the population is ageing. https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2020/

alasdair_• 5 years ago

Is the birthrate still falling now that the “one child” policy is no more?

tellersid3• 5 years ago

I am an American but I completely resonate with Confucian values when it comes to work and learning.

The most insulting thing to me would be to be called lazy. I can see as a society with that many people though this would naturally go too far.

In the West, we are not lazy but delusional as a society. We are the boxing champion that has quit hard training because they think they can't be beat. This is pretty natural after being the champ for so long. We don't need to train, we can just party and still win. That works until the younger talented hungry competitor comes along and you get knocked out. A tale as old as boxing, a tale as old as human history.

ChefboyOG• 5 years ago

Did you just call Rocky IV "a tale as old as human history?"

harryh2• 5 years ago

History has shown us that as societies get richer / more productive people work less. Here is a graph of this in the US:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2e/US...

This makes sense. As people get richer, they use some of their wealth to "purchase" more leisure time. There is no reason to think this won't happen in China, just like it has happened in other places.

I think your fear is unfounded.

SquishyPanda23• 5 years ago

History has shown us that as societies get richer / more productive people work less.

For most of history, when a society gets richer, the rich enslave more people and consolidate power, and then ultimately try to be worshiped as gods until the masses push back enough, and then become content with simply having absolute earthly power.

Maybe this trend is over, but given the amount of effort into putting out "God Emperor" memes in the US, my guess is that some people are at least willing to still try at it.

At any rate, I'm not sure a graph from the US starting at 1950 is sufficient for establishing historical trends.

throwaway769879• 5 years ago

Who's to say the causation behind this correlation doesn't go the other way? Some people take more free time, think of more efficient ways of working, and get richer. That in turn encourages others to emulate them.

TheCoelacanth• 5 years ago

I'm skeptical that decline is caused by increasing wealth rather than by demographic changes like women entering the workforce and a larger portion of the population being retirement-aged.

tomp• 5 years ago

Just because you want to and have the resources to replace anyone anytime, doesn't mean you can actually do that.

In complex codebases (i.e. pretty much anything except "we're managing a Shopify store" (and probably even then)) you're lucky to be able to onboard someone in a few months, forget about days!

kilroy123• 5 years ago

Honestly, I kind of feel the same way. I'm an American living in Europe and it's frustrating for me at times dealing with people who don't want to work.

I don't think the Chinese model of work until you drop dead is good but maybe something in the middle?

yourapostasy3• 5 years ago

I'm an American living in Europe and it's frustrating for me at times dealing with people who don't want to work.

I haven't seen what you experienced nearly as bad, but I think a much larger challenge is dealing with people who are content to repeatedly exercise substantially the same skillsets each year, every year. Even after I take to the trouble to mentor them with identifying what they desire for their career, aligning to their revealed preferences of what user stories they opt to deliver in team scrums, writing up suggested "getting started" lesson plans, pointing out appropriately small, simple improvements in the code base they can apply their new skills towards, and arranging for free access to one of the big technical training sites. You can lead a horse...

baybal2• 5 years ago

And it was so before, just like 4+ hours unpaid overtimes at sweatshops.

What matters is them suddenly remembering it after decades of busting unions, and any labour activism protesting it.

Clearly, they want to mop the floor with tech companies for them becoming bigger than the "sun king."

And they do it this way to pretend that there is no obvious crackdown on private property, and businessmen, while it is exactly the case.

audunw• 5 years ago

I wonder if this will be good or bad for the competitiveness of China if they are able to enforce it.

The company I work in now has no problem competing with Chinese companies working 996, despite us working 7.5h days and having way more vacation days. I believe part of that is that working longer hours doesn't necessarily make you more productive, as has been discussed in tech communities for a while now.

The thing is, to be productive with shorter working hours requires a very different culture. The company I work in now has a very flat structure, and people are encouraged to work on side projects that can improve productivity, and there's a focus on continuously improving methodology. The last company I worked for was Chinese-American (based in US, but 99% Chinese working there), and it was the exact opposite. Decisions on what to work on was made top-down and results were mainly achieved through brute force. Although since we worked in a somewhat independent office in Europe we ended up with a hybrid system.

So the question is, will a shift away from 996 lead to a shift in work culture that increases productivity, or will they just work fewer hours with the same culture?

That seems to be the problem for the CCP in general. They want to make improvements, but they don't really get to the root of the problem. They crack down on after-school tutoring for instance, but they don't change the Gaokao system, so tutoring will just go underground.

secondaryacct3• 5 years ago

I work in China but european company so 965, pretty nice.

The problem as always is: will they deeply want to solve the issue because they understand it, or is it instead now illegal to say that you work 996? :D It's not the same thing: I hope it wont come to that, but sometimes top down systems like ours create the appearance of the result before the result itself.

thinkingemote• 5 years ago

Depends on the job. Most manufacturing jobs is done on a conveyor belt. More time is more stuff.

It's different job from software engineering. More time doesn't lead to more stuff.

nix232• 5 years ago

Also not true with manufacturing (btw software engineering is manufacturing too). More time = More errors = More damaged Machines = Worse QA etc....it's the same as with software.

pjc507• 5 years ago

More time is more stuff.

That's the Taylorist position, but I think Deming would like a word. And in the more sophisticated manufacturing world with shorter more bespoke runs, the problem-solving ability of your employees and their time spent performing non-recurring setup matters as well.

asoneth• 5 years ago

Most manufacturing jobs is done on a conveyor belt. More time is more stuff.

The 40 hour work week actually comes to us from research on the original assembly line. Henry Ford's analysts apparently concluded that 40 hours was optimal for overall productivity. Past that point and the cost due to the greater number of human errors more than canceled out the additional work.

I would wager that this optimal number is different for different people but also for different professions. In professions where fatigue doesn't result in more mistakes or mistakes are cheaper to rectify then the "optimally productive" hours per week might be higher. In professions where fatigue results in even more mistakes and mistakes are more expensive to rectify then the reverse might be true.

And this says nothing of the leverage of the workers themselves -- I suspect software engineers can get away with working fewer hours if they want to due to the fact that they have more leverage than most workers.

accurrent• 5 years ago

I actually think in this case CCP is playing the right cards (unlike in the case of tutoring). I also believe that Chinese are quite tired of having to put up with the exploitative work practices and I highly doubt 996 is anything of a competitive advantage.

The whole mentality of 996 goes back to the time when most of the jobs were manufacturing jobs. If you are a garments factory whats the simplest way to increase throughput? Well, make your workers work harder. If you are in a country the size of China and your workers revolt, replacing them is simple enough. This unfortunately does not work for tech companies. Making software engineers work long hours will just piss them of. Also by its nature spending more time on a piece of code doesn't mean you'll be more productive (in fact I've found the best way to deal with a bug is often take a break and come back and reread your code likely you'll spot the mistake far more easily). Also if a software engineer is good enough they may simply choose to work for an American firm which gives them much more free time and are equally competitive. Furthermore, the more turnover there is in a software firm, the less efficient it is as new hires will have to learn the code base from scratch. So now firing an individual and replacing him may not be as easy as before. Hence, I doubt CCP will actually have to enforce the rule, the firms themselves will self enforce the rules.

GlennS• 5 years ago

Also if a software engineer is good enough they may simply choose to work for an American firm

This seems a bit unlikely to me:

1. Ignores patriotism.

2. The number of good programmers in China is going to overwhelmingly outnumber the opportunities for them to work for a US company.

Joeri• 5 years ago

That doesn’t really work except for the lowest quality tier, because tired workers make mistakes, and mistakes cost time. Automate more to remove the human factor, and the remaining people need to be more focused, not less. There is a sort of maximum amount of net useful work you can get out of a person, taking into account slacking off and correcting for errors, and for most people that is not working 996.

908B64B1977• 5 years ago

Also by its nature spending more time on a piece of code doesn't mean you'll be more productive (in fact I've found the best way to deal with a bug is often take a break and come back and reread your code likely you'll spot the mistake far more easily).

Or realize you don't need the code at all and there's a way to do it better.

tellersid3• 5 years ago

I would think they will become more productive. I love working hard but working hours have dependency when it comes to being unproductive.

That many hours is just hard work signaling or some kind of test of commitment.

Working that many hours is ultimately a cortisol problem that only less work can solve. This is obviously sub-optimal.

Anything China ever seems to do is rather smart and reasoned so I assume they have just figured out this makes no sense and will lead to an increase in productivity.

notpachet2• 5 years ago

Anything China ever seems to do is rather smart and reasoned

Not sure if this was meant as sarcasm? China imposes their fair share policies that are shortsighted and eventually self-destructive, the same as almost all groups of people larger than 0.

goodpoint2• 5 years ago

This is an insightful comment.

Very long working hours are very often associated with inefficient companies that are built on micromanagement.

PragmaticPulp• 5 years ago

The company I work in now has no problem competing with Chinese companies working 996, despite us working 7.5h days and having way more vacation days.

My previous employer rushed to open offices in China because the CEO was convinced that 996 and China’s lower wages would double our productivity while cutting costs in half. They opened an expensive office and got recruiters to hire well credentialed people.

Despite having twice as many people and supposedly working twice as many hours, they struggled to deliver comparable work. We spent a lot of time fixing the work that came out of the 996 office in China.

Don’t get me wrong: There were some talented people in that office who I enjoyed working with. However, the 996 schtick always felt more like a performance art than actual productivity technique. The CEO was ecstatic that he could ask a question in Slack at any time day or night and within minutes they would all respond with many enthusiastically positive Slack responses. Whenever they talked about accomplishing something, they made sure to specifically mention that they accomplished it late at night or on the weekend. They seemed to send more e-mails on Saturday than any other day.

But they weren’t actually doing as much as you’d expect for as many people as they had and as much as they claimed to be working. Their code was notoriously unpolished and was often submitted in “good enough” form as soon as they got it to compile or work enough for demos. We also had strange problems with a lot of employees who were trying to use company resources to do freelance work for other companies, assuming we wouldn’t care or notice.

Unfortunately, their 996 performance worked on the CEO for a while. He was convinced they were our highest performing, most dedicated office. It took several years of buggy software and imminent product launches that never materialized for management to realize that they weren’t actually getting more work out of that office, contrary to their impressions.

The lesson is that you get what you reward: If you try to build an office or company around rewarding people for the appearance of long hours and weekend work, that’s what you’re going to get. If you build the culture around expectations of solid software shipped reasonably fast, people will start figuring out how to accomplish that within their own time.

civilized3• 5 years ago

The performance of working long hours has been a staple of Chinese culture for many years (and Japanese culture, while we're at it). And everyone knows it's a performance.

droopyEyelids• 5 years ago

Reading this post gave me a tremendous feeling of anxiety.

camjohnson26• 5 years ago

Working overtime is usually an antipattern

mdp2021• 5 years ago

an antipattern

Not clear, could you explain?

thesz2• 5 years ago

My former colleagues who was trained for PSP/TSP said that it is recommended to count on 4 hours per day in time-on-task activities. Planning for more ToT hours will result in project being late as if it was planned for 4 hours/day ToT and people will have to work overtime (weekends).

I have to say that remaining 3.5-4 hours are spent on other tasks like documentation reviews, etc.

For time being we can assume relationship of performance regression is 4/ToT if ToT more than 4. This means that these Chinese workers perform 3.5 less work per hour or even less so. One can try to compensate by hiring more workers, say, 3.5 more workers but then the amount of communication will increase quadratically and there will be more than 12 times increase in communication needed for team(s) to work.

That means that "996" policy results in great underutilization of people's potential. My napkin calculation is that each "996" worker performs less than 1/30 of what he/she can do.

Regardless of culture, it is sad.

6keZbCECT2uB• 5 years ago

Documentation is time on task.

pototo6663• 5 years ago

Coming out of one of those 996 companies, I would say that most of my working time are wasted.

I would do almost nothing in the moring. I did most of my work in the afternoon. In the evening I just pretended to be working.

Forcing a real 7.5h day would not hurt most companies. But it would hurt the ego of middle managers, who want to prove that their teams are trying their best by working long hours.

someguydave• 5 years ago

yeah I am skeptical that people are putting in full 12 hour days

OriginalNebula• 5 years ago

I am working 40h in a Middle European country and think that a lot of my working time is wasted.

Somewhere between 20h and 30h and a 4 day working week would be best for performance imo

civilized3• 5 years ago

So how do you spend those morning and evening times? It just seems depressing to have your butt in chair all those hours doing nothing...?

bigjimmyjohnson• 5 years ago

I worked at a US company that wanted us to put in the extra effort and do work after hours. They tracked this with a summary report of work submitted after 5.

So I worked normally and then I'd sit on all my work and wait until just after 5:15 to submit it all and then leave immediately. I didn't get in until 9:30 or 10 anyway so there was literally no difference except my work was delayed.

They praised our team for all the extra work. They really had no clue.

refurb2• 5 years ago

I worked in an Asian country that was notorious for it’s “always on” work culture.

What I realized is people just created their own down time during the work day. The attitude was “if you want me available from 9am to 9pm, then I’ll just just a 2hr lunch, a 1hr dinner and a bunch of 30 min coffee breaks”. They end up doing about 6-8 hrs of actual work. And on top of it end up with a really resentful attitude about their work and boss as well.

Far better to find competent, motivated (not rah-rah, but more like “lets just get it done”) people and tell them what you need done and leave it up to them how to do it.

phatfish• 5 years ago

Sensible working hours and good productivity require good management. Working extended hours like "996" is just brute-forcing results.

You need teams with clear objectives and project plans so employees are able focus on a task without getting side-tracked due to too many responsibilities or bad planning.

This shouldn't mean that agency or creativity is removed, it's simply about providing the right environment for people to work on complex problems.

ren_engineer• 5 years ago

I'd imagine the system is probably similar to Japan where they stay at the office a long time but don't work for most of it. Unless China has something special in the water it's not really possible for knowledge workers to be highly productive based on more hours worked.

AlwaysRock• 5 years ago

I don't know a lot about how the 996 culture came to be but it makes sense to me that is you're a country that is heavily invested in manufacturing goods you could enforce something like this and it would equal a boost in goods produced. But once a large portion or eventually a majority of your exports are high skill knowledge based work (like programming) then the returns will diminish as has been reported many times over the years.

This may just be a natural change as China shifts its core export.

xster• 5 years ago

A bit of a tangent, but how would you change the gaokao system? It's certainly a huge strain on the child, but I'm not sure how to design a different system that allows a similar level of class mobility and fairness either.

powerapple• 5 years ago

What is the root problem of 996?

The crack down on after-school tutoring is mainly to drive the capital away from it, it is not designed to eliminate every single after-school tutoring. CCP does not want the after-school tutoring to be a lucrative business for unicorn IPOs.

honkycat• 5 years ago

I suspect people going home, working out, living their lives, decompressing, and relieving stress would increase productivity.

I'm not screwing caps onto bottles, the number of hours I work has NOTHING to do with how much I get done.

I get 80% of the work done in 20% of the time, the rest is gathering information.

nevermindiguess• 5 years ago

Are yours 7.5h in the office or hours of work? Just curious whether they include lunch and breaks.

baja_blast• 5 years ago

I think there is no way 996 work culture improves productivity. Working that long only causes burn out which makes developers slower and more prone to mistakes, and with more mistakes leads to more effort devoted towards fixing those mistakes.

Personally, my productivity varies greatly depending on my mental state, days when I am feeling fresh/sharp/motivated I can accomplish more in a few hours than I could over days burnt out, and the resulting code is more resilient and thought out than I anything I could produce burnt out. When I am burn out, my mind is foggy and less able to reason about various branches of the program and I am way less motivated.

IMO like other posters have stated, 996 culture is less about productivity and more keeping up appearances with management. In China/SK/Japan you don't leave until your boss leaves, even if your work is done, so you will see people staying late a work shopping online or playing video games. The more the office becomes your home the less productive of an environment it becomes.

stefan_• 5 years ago

Excited to hear Sequoia has introduced 996 for themselves, seeing what a competitive advantage it is. Not too shabby for 66 years old Mike Moritz.

courtf• 5 years ago

I hear slavery is an even bigger competitive advantage. Moritz should chain himself to his desk if he really wants to succeed.

danielovichdk• 5 years ago

As a side note, is there any possible way to keep chineese products out of your life ?

secondaryacct3• 5 years ago

Work 996 at home ?

npteljes• 5 years ago

Not really, as I've found. Even if you manage to find something that's not "made in PRC", you have to realize that many products are complex, and some parts will still be made in China. The other thing is that I don't see that some other places are "better" than China in this way. Are sweatshops better in other places for example?

I think what can be done is to consuming less. Buying second hand. Learning basic techniques to repair. Things like that.

kamray234• 5 years ago

Yeah, it's probably that buying from outside China might be worse, because it will either be really expensive, or it will be made in a country with even worse worker protections. The other way is to just stop buying those things, which will leave you a minimalist with maybe a mattress, and definitely no electronics.

bellyfullofbac• 5 years ago

Answering as a thinking exercise: probably not, or, only if you change your life drastically.

E.g. if you own a car there must be parts in it made in China, even things like screws or connectors. Are you allowed to take public transport for this self-imposed "embargo"?

I guess even your power company has components made in China. Hey, let's buy solar panels and go off-grid, oh wait...

hkmaxpro2• 5 years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/avoidchineseproducts/

runawaybottle• 5 years ago

Good move. I wouldn’t play games with this type of work and extended hours. The nature of the business means a lot of the work won’t equate to perceived personal value, and that burnout and depression will kick in hard inevitably.

They don’t want to learn this the hard way, ask those Foxconn suicide jumpers. Nothing is a competitive advantage when you are a melancholic shell of a person.

Tarsul• 5 years ago

Anyone knows if the verdict says what would be legal? The article only says 996 is illegal.

rfoo• 5 years ago

"Normal" working hours (i.e. 40-hours a week), according to the Labor Law?

China, as a country ruled by communist, do have a Labor Law favoring employees. They just don't enforce it strictly before. For example, you may refuse to work long hours, and if you get fired as a result, you can raise a "labor dispute" and you'll almost always win. The catch is it would take months to resolve and after that, the employer simply pays some severance and nothing more.

enkid3• 5 years ago

Is there any reason to think they will start strictly enforcing it? One ruling confirm an already existing law doesn't seem like a watershed moment to me until we see it changing the way companies are prosecuted for their behavior.

ausudhz3• 5 years ago

Meanwhile banks in NYC are making their interns work for 80 hours a week and people here complaining about 996

tellersid3• 5 years ago

Because the people that run banks are morons.

It is exactly the same thing. It has nothing to do with productivity. It is a test for membership in a club.

feu2• 5 years ago

Both things are bad and deserving of complaint. People have the capacity to be concerned about the bad working practices in both NYC and China at the same time, it's not an either-or situation.

logicchains2• 5 years ago

Someone working 80 hour weeks at a prestige job for the chance of a seven figure income is different from someone working 80 hour weeks just to put food on the table and support their family.

rvba2• 5 years ago

Programmer in China working 996 is a prestige job with a chance of a big payout though.

Programmers have it much easier to switch jobs due to scarcity and high demand - this also applies to China.

ausudhz3• 5 years ago

Programmers in China are treated really well. In some place they even have free massage just to say. Many get stocks and big bonuses at the end of the year. Is one of the high paid jobs in China.

But the funny thing is that you think interns are making a 7 figure salary which is laughable (I was referring to them definitely not to the CEO of BoA)

stayfrosty4204• 5 years ago

That feels like a very different thing. Those interns come out of college with double the salary of their peers and insanely good career prospects. They often come with strong backgrounds and from prestigious schools - they can do almost anything they want.

They can work in retail or commercial banking instead if they want better hours.

axus• 5 years ago

Aren't the Chinese office workers working 996 making double the salary of their peers, with much better career prospects?

pdimitar2• 5 years ago

Making something illegal is only weakly correlated to companies stopping the practice.

I hope this is not just virtue signalling; the CCP has a reputation of hitting hard once it makes up its mind.

But the 996 culture seem to be extremely prevalent in many Asian countries, it seems, and I wonder if a mere official law will change anything. China is huge.

kamray234• 5 years ago

There's been recent crackdowns on corruptions, and there are required to be government representatives at least supervising, but more likely taking part in controlling large businesses, public or private. That's in part to make sure that companies don't do shady deals that would hurt the party, and partly so that worker protections like these can be overseen very intimately. Authoritarian? Of course, but it's the only really reasonable way of making sure no big companies violate laws.

We've seen the opposite in the US, even with some heavy handed measures things like sexual harassment continue to be prevalent among large tech companies, especially older ones. Wonder if you could strike a nice balance at some point?

pdimitar2• 5 years ago

There's been recent crackdowns on corruptions

In China yes, in the rest of the world -- no. :(

That's in part to make sure that companies don't do shady deals that would hurt the party, and partly so that worker protections like these can be overseen very intimately.

First part I'll completely agree with.

The second one is making me skeptical. I'd like that to be true but I am not sure why would it be. A lot of powers just focus on self-preservation and expansion of power and influence and not on the well-being of its denizens. It's one of the reasons why empires fall IMO.

Authoritarian? Of course, but it's the only really reasonable way of making sure no big companies violate laws.

I am from Eastern Europe / the former socialism bloc and I have zero reservations about authoritarian governments. Some of them were very efficient. If greed and self-interest are not allowed to spiral out of the control the authoritarian regimes can be much more efficient than wild uncontrolled capitalism. Especially when you take into account that big capitalists lobby -- the polite word for "bribe" -- the governments to look the other way while they do egregious human rights violations.

I don't mind authoritarian. If done right, it works well (although let's all agree that historically those examples are rare; human greed is not an easy thing to contain and keep under control).

Plus as programmers I think a lot of us will agree that benevolent dictators are usually the best form of governance. Controversial I know but IMO there are good historical examples for it (like Python's leadership of Guido).

We've seen the opposite in the US, even with some heavy handed measures things like sexual harassment continue to be prevalent among large tech companies, especially older ones. Wonder if you could strike a nice balance at some point?

IMO a balance without heavy-handed measures is impossible. The recent scandals and the general last few years of tech news in the area show two things:

- The frat boy culture is extremely resilient. The recent information from Activision/Blizzard showed clear implicit consent from the ruling executives at the time. They knew about what was going on but brushed it off as not important. Of course they will! Their huge payments are secured and it's easy to discount something as non-important when it doesn't happen to you. Furthermore, their bias (former frat boys) makes them lenient and they find excuses for the other frat boys easily.

- Companies don't speak any other language except heavy regulation and huge fines. Absolutely everything else is ignored and is written off as an acceptable risk and/or a cost of doing business. Google fined $500M by the EU? Meh, they make like $15 billion a year, that fine is 3.33% of that and plus I bet they don't have to pay it all in one installment. In the meantime their practices net them those huge revenues so again, they write off the $500M as a cost of doing business and continue as if nothing happened. Same goes for Apple's settled class action lawsuits, or Facebook's fines etc.

---

My point here mostly is: I'd like to have balance as well but IMO the companies in the West have had a free reign with practically zero repercussions for any shady practices, for way too long, and they are confident they'll do it until forever. Somebody has to rudely rid them of this illusion. A lot of things are at stake, one of the biggest of which is the small detail of how much coastal cities will be underwater in 50-100 years if those huge players aren't hit in the gut sooner rather than later.

throw0101a• 5 years ago

For anyone that does not know:

The 996 working hour system (Chinese: 996工作制) is a work schedule practiced by some companies in the People's Republic of China. It derives its name from its requirement that employees work from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm, 6 days per week; i.e. 72 hours per week.[1][2][3][4][5][6]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

SSLy• 5 years ago

It says so in the article too

opan• 5 years ago

Thanks. I'd heard of this before, but my first thought when seeing three numbers describing time is work/play/sleep (commonly 8 of each in the west from what I understand), and it wasn't quite sounding right to me for this context.

paulcole• 5 years ago

I was confused by this as well until it was cleared up in the first sentence of the article.

freebee87• 5 years ago

The taxonomy of jobs in china: Local government positions (<20 hours per week). Relatively low pay. Little job risk . This positions are by design very easy (铁饭碗 or Iron Rice Bowl). There are long vacations and expectations are very low. If you want to spend your time, smoking, having lunch, and going for walks this is the place for you.

Domestic SME’s (20 - 40 hours per week). Moderate job risk - usually from business failure. Think of your small town dentist. If he is on vacation skiing for 2 weeks, no one will complain but business might hurt a bit. Expect Basic, low levels of competence.

Regional and Central Government (40 hours per week). No job risk - substantial risk of being reassigned. One thing the CCP does well is to hire relatively competent people to higher levels positions of governance and MOTIVATE them to accomplish tasks. You will be surprised how many have a reasonable command of English and a daughter with a degree from Oxford.

Division of Non Chinese MNC (40-50 hours per week). Moderate job risk. MNC jobs are considered high status in china because foreign employers are thought to treat employees relatively well. In general they respect local laws and avoid intrusive personal questions. Not considered top of the pecking order.

Large Domestic Exporters (50-60 hours per week). Little job risk - substantial risk of being reassigned. These are the beating heart of Chinese productivity and generally have high quality management. Usually has a local flavor of Taylorism. Loyalty is extremely important. Expect a confusing bureaucracy like any large organization.

Domestic Tech companies (70 hours per week - 996). The pace of product development and iteration within these companies is INSANE. It is like having a three day hackathon only to discover that the team from Missouri solved the problem last night while you were out getting pizza. Code quality, Engineering Practices, IP development does not matter as long as you can crank something out there first. They pay very well by Chinese standards and expect employees to live on the company facilities. Marriage within the company is encouraged as it is thought to foster loyalty. It is common for People burn out very quickly from these jobs.

ailun• 5 years ago

Should note that this describes white-collar jobs. More than half the population works blue-collar or service jobs, and few of them are working less than 6 days a week.

mleonhard2• 5 years ago

Please expand your acronyms: SME and MNC.

marcellus23• 5 years ago

I know two others have commented here but I really want to point out the ridiculousness of this comment. It's literally answered _in the first sentence of the article_. Why did you think this was necessary?

tuatoru2• 5 years ago

I had been waiting for the next announcement. This is the latest move in a series in service of the overarching policy, "increase fertility".

In 2015 the CCP became aware the country was falling off a demographic cliff. It has the example of Japan, whose working-age population has been decreasing since 1997. And it can see the same development in South Korea.

At the time the party responded by altering the one child policy to two children.

Since then it's been lifted to three. That was followed by tax breaks and offering parental leave. (In minuscule quantities, but dilution happens when policy directives filter down from the top.)

Once low fertility has become ingrained in a culture, it takes a lot more than that to turn it around, though. Especially with other anti-fertility head winds (below).

This year the party has:

- put limits on for-profit tutoring and banned teaching the school syllabus to under-sixes--the costs of these were seen as a major road block to having more than one child.

- publicly compared video games to opium (which probably has immense cultural resonance), and acted to limit on-line shopping/personal finance-- both alternative uses of time to the "delights of domestic society".

- and now the party has acted to reduce the effect work has on fertility by helping people to have some time and energy left after work. (Which time and energy it would be inadvisable to spend on video games or shopping, given the panopticon in China.)

----

The party will need to go further, though. There are still a lot of things in the way of having more than one child. The party will have to alter the hukou system so that children can attend schools and medical facilities in the cities where their parents work rather than in the villages where they officially live. It will have to reform the gaokao college entrance exam system.

It will also have to act to curb housing prices (Chinese men basically can't get a partner unless they own housing), and it will have to raise retirement ages and introduce a pension so that people don't have to save so desperately to support their parents and then themselves in old age. (Retirement is at 55 for women in China--or was until recently.)

I expect raising retirement ages to come soon, maybe in two years. However, once a generation has been raised in which one-child familes is the norm, it's difficult to lift fertility to two or more children.

1. Japan's working age population: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTJPM647S

2. Japan's population pyramid for comparison: https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/2019/

3. China's population pyramid: https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2019/

goodpoint2• 5 years ago

If humanity is to survive on this planet, decreasing consumption and pollution and ensuring economical degrowth are the first priorities.

Reaching 0 or negative population growth globally is part of this.

Getting out of such unsustainable competitive mindset is the first step.

kamray234• 5 years ago

Degrowth is not a reasonable idea. Humanity lives for humanity, not for the Earth. We just happen to need the Earth. Progress is the good way out, for both humanity and the Earth.

Humanity could, energy-wise, become green within a few years, were it a profitable investment. We have fresh water and food, both in global surplus. Pollution-wise, the only reason everything isn't recycled is that it's cheaper to not do so.

After we have that squared away, space mining technology is currently moving at an immense rate. It wouldn't be profitable to do so yet, but if we disregard that, it would be possible. That alone takes out most of our environmental impact outside of energy.

It's not a matter of us running out of capacity. This planet can support 10-12 billion without breaking a sweat. It's a matter of us being unwilling to move towards that goal, prioritising having constant growth in the short term over having sustainable overall growth in the long term.

Sometimes it isn't about simple capital gain, the profits made from asteroid mining are not monetary but environmental. And yet modern economics, essentialist and ossified, is so obsessed with the idea of number go up that we can't go there.

tuatoru2• 5 years ago

I agree. I don't advocate for what China is doing. I'm describing what I see.

If a state (country) has "continue to exist forever" as an objective, then under that it will have "maintain national security in both the short run and the long run" as a sub-objective, and part of that is "maintain military strength'. To maintain a military requires a population of young adults. It always has, throughout history (and probably before).

CCP leaders both know history and are numerate. They can also stick with policies for at least ten years.

Again, I'm describing what I see, not advocating for it.

Apart from population momentum, we have the conditions for long-run negative growth everywhere in the world except in sub-Saharan Africa. Momentum should dissipate in another generation. Sub-Saharan Africa seems unlikely to meet the UN's population projections for other reasons.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_momentum

tsjq• 5 years ago

agree with the observation. it was legal when it was benefiting them. now when they have other priorities, suddenly this is illegal. same with 1-child, 2-child , 3-child policy. now their priority is to expand their population into Tibet, Afghanistan , Xinjiang, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, etc new territories: in the next 2-3 decades. so, population growth becomes paramount priority. So, "drop everything else. make more babies"

defaultprimate• 5 years ago

As if the majority of China has the luxury of only working 72 hours a week.

mathattack• 5 years ago

I spent time in Japan on a project with an 80 hour per person average workload. It was millions of dollars over budget and years late. Putting in the hours was cultural around not wanting to let the team down, but there was a leadership failure too. Crushing people to implement bad (or vague or undocumented) decisions made the problem go from bad to worse over time.

My sense is that in tech jobs it just doesn’t scale.

There are professions where it does seems to work. Banking analysts who expect to go back to school in 2 years crush themselves to get Goldman Sachs banking on the resume.

akomtu4• 5 years ago

CCP starts looking like a US corporation. Their PR department says "996 policy is illegal" and lower-rung VPs read the subtext and make the policy illegal, on paper, but at the same time create conditions that effectively enforce 996 without it being an official policy.

burnished8• 5 years ago

That might be the end result but I don't see why you think thats the intent. Literally, what would be the point then?

nirui• 5 years ago

As a Chinese myself, I've been through a lots of this kind of paper reading club. And yes, you read the law you then you roughly know what is illegal. And clearly, those people in the reading club can read paper text in it's literal means, so that's a cognitive pass, congrats!

However, let's don't forget that you cannot form labor union without blessings from the party. Let's also don't forget that in China, company can fire people really easily, they just hide those unfair or even discriminatory reasons under the table, no one will help you because helping people is too costly.

There is a labor union in China of course, The labor union, called ACFTU, or All-China Federation of Trade Unions. I don't remember when was the last time they actually sued someone/company, maybe never.

Personally, I don't think those paper laws and paper institutions are actually there to serve the general public. So I don't even care what they've said, nothing will change for the better.

Ericson23145• 5 years ago

I feel like there are reasons the government might want these and other related reforms to activately happen? The more corporate interests surely want max exports 4eva, but the state doesn't want quasi-private institutions to get more powerful and would also like a larger consumer economy to be less reliant on the state of the rest of the globe?

People do need to work less to consume more.

yellow_lead• 5 years ago

The enforcement is inconsistent. It seems the CCP is just against tech companies right now. Maybe because they realized they have some concentration of power.

MichaelZuo3• 5 years ago

Does this “ACFTU” have any searchable records, court cases, etc.? (In Chinese or English)

duxup• 5 years ago

Is this enforced then / complied with?

I know that historically Chinese judiciary has little power of its own. I'm wondering how likely anything changes here.

antoniuschan99• 5 years ago

The 996 Github Repo is one of the Top Starred

https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU

vmception• 5 years ago

Illegal in favor of….?

In accordance with which law?

Was it too much work?

Too little work?

Overtime benefits miscalculated?

Does China’s legal system have that much nuance?

The Reuters article doesnt say!

m3kw9• 5 years ago

So they just tell employees to leave one minute before 9pm.

illuminati1911• 5 years ago

I’ve been working in software engineering in China for few years now. Never worked for 996 company, but I know many who do.

Most of the 996 companies that I’ve seen tend to be ultra shitty sweatshops delivering less than bare minimum and with less security than what a university CS freshman would implement. There are obviously exceptions to this, but in China culturally speaking, it’s often much more important what things look like than what they actually are. That’s the core essense of 996. As long as you seem to be working hard and long time, everything else is secondary.

I find it ridiculous how random business managers in EU and US say this shit show would be competitive advantage. It’s everything but.

That being said China has several real competitive advantages over western countries, but media rarely speaks about then.

raincom2• 5 years ago

Besides cheap and slave labor, what are other "real competitive advantages over western countries" which China has, but which "media rarely speaks about then" ?

This is not a rhetorical question. Just interested to know.

jbay808• 5 years ago

Domestic production of almost everything in the world. This is also immensely valuable to innovation because it's easy to make new things and test new ways of making things.

Do you expect that "designed and engineered in X, made in China" is a sustainable situation when most of those designers and engineers have never set foot in the factory that makes their product, and never will?

WiSaGaN• 5 years ago

The supreme court released several actual cases ruled in favor of employees that set precedent for similar cases. The "say" in the title is just disingenuous and sad.

bobthepanda3• 5 years ago

A headline only has room for so many words. It was both the court and relevant ministry, but clarifying both and what exactly they did is the purpose of the article, not a terse headline.

Also, there is a bit of a distinction in China between "rule of law" and "rule by law", so the question of equal, consistent enforcement needs to be proven out a bit as it's early days.

hkmaxpro2• 5 years ago

China's top court and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security on Thursday published guidelines and examples on what constituted as overtime work

(Emphasis mine)

See also this line from the state media The Global Times: (https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202108/1232602.shtml)

The Supreme People's Court (SPC) of China and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security recently jointly released a guideline illustrating 10 typical cases of overtime work, stipulating that the "996" overtime work policy is illegal

The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security is also saying the policy is illegal. The title of the Reuters article is perfectly correct.

SerLava• 5 years ago

This happened on the same day the US Supreme Court decided to make 5-10 million Americans homeless.

Ericson23145• 5 years ago

According to the basic argument of https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300244175/trade-wars-are... I think stuff like this is a really good sign for employees everywhere.

I hope it puts some pressure on Japan and Korea too.

Chinese authorities say overtime '996' policy is illegal

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