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Young Chinese are sick of working long hours
- nickthemagicman 8y agoWelcome to the club! There's 400 million Americans who feel the exact same way!
- Freak_NL 8y agoJapanese too. Keep in mind that this article is written from a British/European standpoint, where working overtime is an exception, not the norm.
- ekianjo 8y agoJapanese may work overtime but they are hardly "busy", at least in major corporations which constitute a large bulk of the salary men workforce. Lots of useless meetings where people sit around saying and doing nothing. They just stay late.
- holydude 8y agoSame in Korea and Singapore and I doubt it's any different in China. You work for the sake of working not because you have something that urgently needs to be taken care of.
- bena 8y agoIt's been so long, but I remember reading something about that, the illusion of productivity. The author was relating an experience in which the secretary would do this little fake jog thing to wherever she was going. It wasn't any faster than walking and he asked her why she just didn't walk. She said that she didn't want to seem like she was slacking.
- sotojuan 8y agoI don't know about China, but at least the Japanese get something out of their crazy work agreement, at least traditional salaryman jobs. Lifetime employment, solid middle class salary forever, pension, etc. Some companies will do your taxes, help your kids go to a good school, and even set you up with someone to marry.
- indoorfish 8y agoIt's unbelievably respectful as an agreement between a profit focused business and their workers. It should be emulated.
- Apocryphon 8y agoCorporate feudalism where your daimyo actually protects you
- Someone1234 8y agoThen why call it "overtime." Mandatory overtime as a concept is contradictory, that's just the new work-hours.
- Asooka 8y agoThe government sets the standard working hours. You're asked to work for that much time, plus an additional time over that. It's overtime with respect to the standard, which might not necessarily be the median for your company.
- jschwartzi 8y agoBecause some of our ancestors rioted and fought and unionized to establish the 40 hour work week, and we want to preserve their legacy. And because it's not entitled to want to have a life outside of your salaried job.
- walshemj 8y agoThat depends in traditional blue collar industries OT was where you made $bank - as do UK train drivers who often work a 4 day week with OT /weekend working paid even more lucratively. I have also heard that for a Pit Deputy (deep coal mining) the going rate for a single weekend 10 hour shift is £2k.
- pc86 8y agoWell that's weird since there's only 325 million of us, and the percentage which has mandatory overtime is pretty low. Even lower if you specify mandatory unpaid overtime.
- IloveHN84 8y agoWho's not tired of working overtime?
- collyw 8y agoMe. I think I am underpaid (actually I think most devs in my country are underpaid) so i don't do it with the exception of when I made a major cock up and the team was waiting on me.
- kevas 8y agoSerious question: why do you think you're underpaid? Why do you feel you should be making more. The market has said that you're currently worth/getting paid X. So... why think you're Y?
- Micrococonut 8y agoWhy would you assume that what he is being paid is his current market value? It's entirely possible that he is being paid well under his market value, thus creating feelings of being underpaid.
- monsieurbanana 8y agoHe said "actually I think most devs in my country are underpaid".
- mayniac 8y agoThey also said the words "cock up" They're very likely in the UK. They are very likely getting underpaid for dev work, unless they're a contractor. Our salaries are definitely lower here than in the states.
- collyw 8y agoI am from the UK working in Spain, I think the UK pays better than here, though depends on the location.
- bantunes 8y agoMillennials - the beginning of the end for China's authoritarian government? :D
- holydude 8y agoIt's ineffective. Lots of asian nations that work overtime are doing it pointlessly because they are already exhausted and do not really contribute that much.
- marsrover 8y ago> Li said that initially he felt he couldn’t be too be picky: he had majored in English, not in one of the sought-after science or technology fields, and he had attended a low-ranked university. Many of his friends are unemployed. To me, this was the most interesting part of the article. It all sounds so familiar.
- commandlinefan 8y ago> sought-after science or technology fields Hell, I did major in one of the sought-after science or technology fields, and unpaid overtime is an infuriating, unavoidable fact of my life.
- amenod 8y agoIt is really not. It depends on the field, country and other factors, but it is very much avoidable. I know, I don't do overtime unless it's by my choice. And it is mostly about choosing an employer (if you have that privilege) with the appropriate company culture. What good is money if you can't spend it?
- jschwartzi 8y agoI left my last company because of the miserable work culture. It was a life-changing product that a lot of people were excited about but I could barely bring myself to come into work every day. I felt so exploited by the employer that I gave notice before I had another job lined up. They really wanted me to stay so they offered me an extra month's salary if I would stay on for 2 more months, but I said no.
- fhood 8y agoI was kind of surprised by this. I would have though that speaking decent English would be a fairly valuable skill for Chinese companies that operate outside of China.
- vkou 8y agoAn understanding of history and ethics and psychology is also a valuable skill, but if that's your only skill, you'll be making lattes.
- eumenides1 8y ago“In my experience young people, especially the post-90s generation, are reluctant to work overtime – they are more self-centered,” says labour rights expert Li Jupeng, one of many who have observed some millennials challenging the 996 concept. self-centered is a funny word. It implies selfish, but is it really selfish if it's self-preservation?
- asdfologist 8y agoYeah, clearly the employers are not self-centered for demanding grueling work hours.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Someone1234 8y agoI have to imagine something was lost in translation there? My brain just cannot fathom how "overtime" by the very nature of the word can be anything but an optional extra. You'd just as likely selfishly choose overtime as you would not choose it.
- ddeck 8y agoI can't speak to the situation in the mainland, but in Hong Kong, "overtime" for employees in smaller local companies often means the period that you must work beyond your scheduled finish time, and for which you are not paid. It is not optional if you plan on keeping your job
- s73v3r_ 8y agoThere are many ways to make something a "choice" that you really have no choice in.
- walshemj 8y agoProbably a translation from a Confucian concept in English
- 8y ago
- ggregoire 8y agoI've worked in 2 countries on 2 different continents and working overtime is common in both. A combination of easily-manipulated young employees and terrible project managements, in most cases. My country has labour laws to protect employees against that BS, but people still do it.
- insensible 8y agoCan we get the word Chinese capitalized in the HN title?
- logfromblammo 8y agoThey should join a union, or form a socialist workers' party, or something.~
- avcdsuia 8y agoWe are even not allowed to have feminist organizations, any non-governmental groups with powers are considered threat to this country.
- phyller 8y agoIt was a joke. He was implying that if the workers took hold of the means of production, they could displace the capitalist bourgeoisie that are exploiting them. Then they could set up some sort of People's Republic, with a single, communal political party that represents the people, not the powerful minority. They could call it the "People's Republic of China". That would solve everything, what could go wrong? Communism in action!
- jadedhacker 8y agoDoes it look like the workers own the means of production in China or is it a mix of government and private capitalists? If so, that's state and private capitalism. If the workers own the means of production it means they literally are the managers of the factories in a democratic fashion. You wouldn't see much useless overtime if that happened.
- phyller 8y agoThat is the joke. The communist government, that was supposed to liberate the people, created this situation. It didn't work like it was supposed to did it?
- ben509 8y agoChina is not communist, it's state socialism! No one has ever tried communism. (Except that they obviously tried state socialism, which is supposed to be the precursor to socialism, which itself is a precursor to communism, but going through the precursor steps to communism doesn't count as trying communism because... reasons.)
- yakuza00000 8y agoPoor Chinese Millennials. They are frustrated their country turned dictatorship. They are constantly monitored by the big brother, social credit score, public cameras that have facial recognition. Their words censored by wechat, and the great firewall. If they say something wrong, they will be watched and put on no travel list. There's no moving up the ladder; they're stuck trying to buy a $500k house with a meager $1000/month income. There's no other good investment choices. They see tuhaos (country bumpkin milllionnaires) drive maseratis around. They see CEOs being disappeared by the government with each passing day, which tells them if they're ever successful, that's the fate that awaits them. Their only hope is to escape to Australia or Canada. But in the meantime they have to endure horrific pollution and rising inflation.
- ausjke 8y agogosh this sounds like a revolution in the cooking state, is this totally true? maybe not that bad I hope. the big problems are the debt and the house bubble, one of them blows up will cause serious issues, so far so good it seems.
- imglorp 8y agoLast time they stood up to speak, 10,000 students were murdered in public to make an example. They might think twice now.
- merpnderp 8y agoExcept that history isn't taught in China.
- stevenwoo 8y agoIf the government suppresses the history of the event in China, how are the protesters of tomorrow supposed to know to think twice?
- qiqing 8y agoActually, everyone knows about it and people talk very openly about it off the record, but no one is willing to talk about it in a recorded medium with a Westerner.
- 1_800_UNICORN 8y agoVery interesting article, but I was disappointed that the article stated that the millenial only-children of China are "outspoken", "pampered", or "self-centered". I don't believe that any of those terms apply to people who are fighting against working 72 hours per week for low pay. This is a case of basic human rights. The words that come to mind to describe the folks who are fighting this fight are "proud", "resilient", and "hard-working".
- taurath 8y agoAll those adjectives are always applied in relative terms, and aren’t any universal standard!
- Sangermaine 8y agoIt's nice to see that however much America and China might be at odds, they can apparently agree on attacking their young people as lazy and entitled.
- aurailious 8y ago"Millennials are now killing the Chinese manufacturing industry!"
- onlywei 8y agoThe word "millenials" as a classification is not used in China. Everyone gets classified instead as 80后，90后，00后， etc. (meaning born after 1980, born after 1990, born after 2000, etc.). Because of China's rapid economic growth, the difference in attitudes for someone born in the 80s versus someone born in the 90s is actually very pronounced.
- RandomTisk 8y agoCare to elaborate? Does one look down on the other?
- freehunter 8y ago
- l5870uoo9y 8y agoWonder how deep and widespread this dissatisfaction really is, beyond a simple worker dispute in a country where so many other public disputes are not tolerated. Sure, you can find anecdotal statistics and generalize it, but my impression is that the extreme performance culture not only is accepted, but an integral part of the Chinese school system and upbringing. The 6 to 1 model with; 1 child, 2 parents and 4 grandparents who project their expectations and family reputation on to the child seems to structurally strengthened this. Not to mention that the neighbouring countries have practiced this for decades. Recently hung out with a Chinese women in her twenties and to her studying 12 hours per day for a child was completely natural.
- teknopaul 8y agoI went to China and everyone i met was doing 9-5 monday to friday. A school leaver with no qualifications in his chosen career finds his first job is crap is not really world news. Change jobs and hang in there kid. China's unemployment rate is lower than the uk where this article originates. You have labour laws. The worst expected unpaid overtime hours i ever worked or saw worked was in a bank in London. 885 was totally normal. Making news out of a single case study implying its universal it not really responsible news, even if it is not quite fake news.
- nathanyukai 8y agoI'm surprised with your experience. I'm chinese and almost everyone I know work for extra hours regularly, without any extra salary. It's definitely a bad work culture and being discussed a lot on varies chinese forums
- vthallam 8y ago> chinese forums Curious on whether these forums are moderated or monitored by Govt? And are there any online places where people can discuss without fear of the Chinese govt?
- nathanyukai 8y agoyes, all popular forums (Baidu, Weibo, Zhihu etc) are moderated. But to be honest, I feel like you misunderstood of the whole "monitored by government" situation in china. It's true that we can't discuss about certain history event or some sensetive policy (people still do that using code language or whatever). But I assure you no one is having fear discussing it, as long as you are not deliberately spreading those negative things in a large scale.
- yakuza00000 8y agoYou were a travelor, and didn't live there. You are comparing your own experience as an analyst in Banking, one of the most brutal industry for work. "600,000 Chinese die from overworking each year" http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2016-12/11/content_27635578.htm http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2016-12/11/content_276355...
- nimbius 8y agoAs an engine tech for a diesel truck service center, I can seriously sympathize with where young chinese people are coming from. excessive overtime, even paid, can turn you into a miserable zombie pretty fast. somewhat quickly after my apprenticeship I was gifted quite a bit of nonsense overtime from the old timers. rotor turns, oil changes, timing, valve clearance, etc... were all heaped up on me until I was spending nearly 70 hours a week in a shop that advertised working hours of about 8 hours a day. My paycheck was more than enough to buy a new motorcycle, but social events like going out to dinner or seeing a ball game were out of the question. I was exhausted by the time I finished, despite the fact that most of my work used air tools. I could only keep it up for about a month before i started to seriously burn out. I found out managers despised having to cut huge overtime checks but found hiring a new tech too time consuming and costly in terms of training and certification. Whats worse is sometime around the thanksgiving holiday I walked into the shop with nearly 30 brake services to do in a single day because the front office had made promises to customers that I would be available without checking to see that I had a major engine service that would take up most of the day. Young guns might want overtime, but management can get addicted to it and its not a problem until you're knee deep in paperwork and turning customers away.
- otoburb 8y ago>>I found out managers despised having to cut huge overtime checks but found hiring a new tech too time consuming and costly in terms of training and certification. >>[...] Young guns might want overtime, but management can get addicted to it and its not a problem until you're knee deep in paperwork and turning customers away. Those are the two competing forces at work: short-term pain in reduced productivity to train and mentor new hires to avoid long-term issues where your supply becomes too constrained to meet demand spikes.
- swozey 8y agoWell if you ever decide to get into pre-revenue startups like a lot of us you're basically primed and ready to commit to the 6mo-3yr+ hell of 70 hour weeks. You won't get overtime, ever, but maybe you'll walk out with a tiny percent of RSUs that don't expire or become worthless before you forget about them. Probably not.
- Install_Gentoo 8y agoWhen will they have a actual communist revolution in that country? Why does Xi let the gentle laborer suffer until 2049?
- tankerdude 8y agoThe article references the 996 hours and the title of the article is about UNPAID overtime. If it truly is unpaid, I would walk away in a heartbeat as well. Unless it’s office work, getting tired in a warehouse would mean higher chances of injury and death. Would you in the US be informed that you are getting paid $20/hr but it stops at 8 hours? There is a reason that the US has laws about the minimum that people can get paid on a salary.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago"There is a reason that the US has laws about the minimum that people can get paid on a salary." There is no federal law in the US about that. California has such a law, but it requires being reported to be enforced, and as such, is not very often enforced.
- adventured 8y agoThere is in fact a Federal law that covers that. The Fair Labor Standards Act. https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=0bd0fa78-f456-4731-a925-cc48c2f94a53 https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=0bd0fa78-f456... Someone else here can speak to whether the exemption rate minimum was officially raised from the old $455 per week (the DOL was attempting to increase it). You legally must be paid at least the minimum wage unless you're exempt, and then the minimum weekly pay is in force. The only exclusions are for tip workers, certain types of farm labor, and certain types of seasonal temporary employment. The DOL also recently increased its penalties for non-compliance: https://www.fisherphillips.com/Wage-and-Hour-Laws/flsa-penalties-increase https://www.fisherphillips.com/Wage-and-Hour-Laws/flsa-penal...
- freeone3000 8y ago(amount made) / (hours worked) >= (minimum wage) is all FLSA says. At tech worker salaries, that equation would hold if you worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It doesn't make the fundamental problem of mandatory unpaid overtime go away.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
- xenihn 8y agoThis is a huge issue in Hong Kong and Singapore too. The work hours in both are crazy.
- cossatot 8y agoSort of off topic but maybe not: I'm in Chengdu right now, my first trip to China since 2010. I had previously just been to Beijing among Chinese cities (lots of time camping in Xizang backcountry otherwise). Chengdu is so tranquil, orderly and clean compared to the Beijing of my memory. People don't yell or spit, traffic lights are obeyed and drivers slow for pedestrians, the city is quite nice. Is this just the difference between the megacities and the smaller cities, or has Chinese urban culture matured a bit?
- ciguy 8y agoThat's just a Chengdu thing. I don't know why precisely but it's widely considered one of the nicest Chinese cities. A few local I know even claimed it's the San Francisco of China, whatever that means.
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoChengdu has a reputation as being a very laidback place with laidback people. Supposedly, it actually goes back to an irrigation project during the Qin state (before the Qin dynasty), which made life pretty easy in Sichuan. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dujiangyan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dujiangyan But people in Kunming are also laid back, I get the feeling that southwest China is just that way.
- ben509 8y ago> Pilots or train conductors, for example, can work longer shifts than the eight hours stipulated under Chinese law. I can't think of anyone who I'd less want to be working excessive hours than pilots.
- joejev 8y agoWhat about a 9 hour flight? Bring 2 sets of pilots?
- patrickg_zill 8y agoNASA supposedly found that its programmers' code quality dropped after about 40-45 hours of work per week. Scandinavian and Slovenian immigrants to the USA, working as coal miners, felt that 8 hour days were important (http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/52/v52i07p246-263.pdf http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/52/v5... pg 254) and negotiated to have that included in their employment contracts. So is it perhaps universal that 8 to 10 hours per day is what people feel comfortable with?
- CamelCaseName 8y agoI'm curious if the 40-45 hour work week is cultural. Maybe if society was set up for a 20 or 60 hour work week, we'd see the same type of productivity cliff.
- Joeri 8y agoI think it’s more like 60 to 80 hours per week of “work”, both personal and professional. A society set up for 60 hours a week would have you outsource pretty much all housework, shopping and assorted chores in order not to burn out. I believe it when people routinely do 70 hour weeks, but only if they don’t have a personal life of their own that they sink effort into.
- Consultant32452 8y agoBack before the 40 hour work week a lot of those tasks were outsourced to wives.
- isostatic 8y ago> During the 40 hour week that work was outsourced to wives It wasn't until the late 70s that married women start to maintain full time jobs in large numbers (The 'quiet revolution'), but the 40 hour week was in place 30 years earlier. Of course now we have the situation where you have to have two full time earners to run a household. When I was at highschool in the 90s, I was quite unusual in having two working parents. My best friend for most of high school had a stay at home dad, who looked after him and his younger brother, my other close friend has a stay at home mom. That was fine, as house prices were still in the c. 4 time average income range. It's the other way round now, where house prices are in the c. 8 times average income range, so it's rare to find anyone with a single income family, and UK society subsidises the two income lifestyle and childcare industry -- you get tax breaks for sending your 1 year old to nursery 50 hours a week, but not for asking a grandparent to look after them, or even reduce your hours so (god forbid) the parents can look after them.
- chaostheory 8y agoThis isn't just about human rights and treating people fairly, this is about poor efficiency. There are multiple reasons we have the 40-ish hour work week. https://medium.com/building-asana/work-hard-live-well-ead679cb506d https://medium.com/building-asana/work-hard-live-well-ead679... "Many people believe that weekends and the 40-hour workweek are some sort of great compromise between capitalism and hedonism, but that’s not historically accurate. They are actually the carefully considered outcome of profit-maximizing research by Henry Ford in the early part of the 20th century. He discovered that you could actually get more output out of people by having them work fewer days and fewer hours." http://www.bcmj.org/article/impact-sleep-deprivation-resident-physicians-physician-and-patient-safety-it-time-wake-call http://www.bcmj.org/article/impact-sleep-deprivation-residen... "In US hospitals, 50000 to 100000 patients die annually from medical errors, and inadequate sleep among physicians may be a factor." I'm sure there's more data from WWII and later sleep studies as well, yet everyone continues to ignore it.
- nebgnahz 8y agoIt may be worse than 996. WeChat easily penetrates employee's life after 9. A message from your boss that requests something urgent, and you begin working again.
- m3kw9 8y agoWhen the rest of the developed world is working 9-5, who wants to work 9-9
- redleggedfrog 8y ago996 doesn't sound a whole lot like a Communist Workers paradise. Time for another revolution!
- AsianScum 8y ago9-9-6 work culture isn't horrible. In Taiwan, people usually pretends to being hardly working, no matter he or she are goofing. The boss are pleased by getting the "free" man-hours from his employers and believing this are leading to the more product outputs. Finally, if you're more hardly working, you're just possibly losting more "earn value" by yourself in some odd industries.
- caio1982 8y agoOne thing that drives me crazy (and to be honest has been impacting even my own family) is that companies learned to use gamification technics to engage young ones at work so they eventually don't think they are spending time at the office with overtimes, they are being psychologically rewarded constantly so it is not a social burden. Perhaps people in China just started to hit the upper limit of that and other countries will follow in some years once people get it does not pay off.
- snambi 8y agoWell, everyone is sick of working long hours. Why only Chinese?
- ChuckMcM 8y agoOk, it occurs to me that they are re-creating the bay area where people work lots of hours, have long commutes, and don't make enough money to buy houses near where they work. Presumably that isn't intentional. I expect it is not surprising that this isn't sustainable. Too many of my co-workers went through burnout, nasty divorces, or both from living this lifestyle. I consciously chose to balance family/work more and paid the price of slower advancement and missed opportunities. But in the process learned a lot about teams that that do work well with good balance. There are a lot of things that conspire to work against sane work environments, not the least of which is the magical feeling when you push really hard and you get way more done than was expected. That in turn gets praise and glory which encourages managers to go back to that well again and again. Until it is the only way the team operates and everyone burns out. As a manager I feel it is my job to protect my team from being burnt out in this way and push back on demands that cannot be met. But I am also trying to figure out inefficiencies and work with folks to get them what they need so that they aren't fighting internal processes as much as they are the problems they are trying to solve.
- shamaku 8y agoHow is this not legal slavery?
- m23khan 8y agoCan confirm that the 996 schedule is also applied towards a lot of office+retail jobs in Pakistan.