23 ms·

Chinese authorities say overtime '996' policy is illegal

393 points by hkmaxpro 5y ago

the_cramer 5y 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 5y 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.
  - secondaryacct 5y 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.
    - pjc50 5y ago
      > simple: we emigrate to China Let us know how simple this works out in practice.
      - feu 5y ago
        It wasn't especially difficult pre-COVID. I know a few people from the UK and Bulgaria who have done so.
        usr1106 5y ago
        Yes. And I know some who returned around 2018ish because the oppression was growing a lot.
        kwere 5y ago
        Unless You go here with investiment Money Is difficult to get permits
- mschuster91 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
  It's an instance of Prisoner's dilemma.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
- simonh 5y 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.
  - pjc50 5y 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.
    - owlmirror 5y ago
      You must ask yourself what is the reason that people in London have more money. Purchasing power is not something that manifests itself out of thin air, as well as exchange rates of money. An economy in which the people have multiple times the purchasing power must do something right. And moving people in that economy around is more valuable than moving people elsewhere.
      - z2 5y ago
        For instance, having a century headstart in industrialization and fast economic growth? It actually returns to a longer scale version of having accumulated wealth through working a long time... Also taxi driving isn't exactly the most efficient of markets to compare value. London taxi drivers for example have a unique barrier to entry to become a taxi driver via an onerous road memorization test ("The Knowledge"), and that has nothing to do with the general British economy "doing something right."
- logicchains 5y 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/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2020/
  - alasdair_ 5y ago
    Is the birthrate still falling now that the “one child” policy is no more?
    - kwere 5y ago
      Kids are too expensive: there Is no welfare, highest taxes of the world and wages are "depressed" to keep competivity combinerà with real estate kegabubble and education really expensive from infancy
- tellersid 5y 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 5y ago
    Did you just call Rocky IV "a tale as old as human history?"
    - throwaway284534 5y ago
      Well, to be generous, Gilgamesh did suffer from a boredom so severe that his own people begged the gods to bring him an equal. After Enkidu showed up, he spent more time adventuring and fighting mythical creatures, instead of wrestling the townsfolk and enjoying the perks of prima nocta.
- harryh 5y 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_working_hours_1950-2014.png/440px-US_working_hours_1950-2014.png 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 5y 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.
    - flerchin 5y ago
      I've got my finger on the pulse of spicy memes, and I've never seen a God Emperor one. Is this some kind of Trumpist thing?
    - harryh 5y ago
      For most of history, when a society gets richer, the rich enslave more people and consolidate power This is not true. The enormous rise in wealth of the world in the 20th/21st centuries has coincided with large increases in personal freedoms as well. At any rate, I'm not sure a graph from the US starting at 1950 is sufficient for establishing historical trends. The trend is consistent with other datasets: https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours
  - throwaway769879 5y 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.
- tomp 5y 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!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kilroy123 5y 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?
  - yourapostasy 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
- secondaryacct 5y 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 5y 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.
  - nix23 5y 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.
stefan_ 5y 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 5y ago
  I hear slavery is an even bigger competitive advantage. Moritz should chain himself to his desk if he really wants to succeed.
danielovichdk 5y ago
As a side note, is there any possible way to keep chineese products out of your life ?
- secondaryacct 5y ago
  Work 996 at home ?
- npteljes 5y 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.
  - kamray23 5y 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 5y 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...
- hkmaxpro 5y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/avoidchineseproducts/ https://www.reddit.com/r/avoidchineseproducts/
runawaybottle 5y 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 5y ago
Anyone knows if the verdict says what would be legal? The article only says 996 is illegal.
- rfoo 5y 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.
  - enkid 5y 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.
    - p_l 5y ago
      There is apparently a recent push to go after exploitative practices of big giants, including also in terms of labour policies (including treatment of delivery workers). And if you want a cynical reading - the companies that are famous for 996 are also the kind of companies that are recently getting reminders that they do not guide the policy in the country, so it's beneficial for the party to actually prosecute them.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
ausudhz 5y ago
Meanwhile banks in NYC are making their interns work for 80 hours a week and people here complaining about 996
- tellersid 5y 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.
- feu 5y 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.
- logicchains 5y 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.
  - rvba 5y 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.
    - bingohbangoh 5y ago
      There are vanishingly few bank jobs and so the hazing process to get them is brutal. The banks push their associates to work 80hr/wk because they can. Technologists, for instance, don't work these hours (something closer to 60hr/wk in my experience). The 996 phenomenon seems to be more common. It's as if every job put you through the ringer.
  - ausudhz 5y 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)
pdimitar 5y 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.
- kamray23 5y 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?
  - pdimitar 5y 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 5y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system
- SSLy 5y ago
  It says so in the article too
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- opan 5y 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 5y ago
  I was confused by this as well until it was cleared up in the first sentence of the article.
- freebee87 5y 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.
tuatoru 5y 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 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTJPM647S 2. Japan's population pyramid for comparison: https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/2019/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/2019/ 3. China's population pyramid: https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2019/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2019/
redis_mlc 5y ago
The article didn't mention the real reason for moving away from 996. The current unemployment rate is over 20%. (They call it the "flexible market.") And China might be called a Communist country, but there's few benefits unless you're a CCP member.
defaultprimate 5y ago
As if the majority of China has the luxury of only working 72 hours a week.
mathattack 5y 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.
akomtu 5y 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.
- burnished 5y 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?
steve76 5y ago
If people you hate, like big oil or the police ran a tabloid, would you believe it? That's what you are reading here. You think they are honest? The only thing their leadership cares about is the facade of legitimacy. They will say and do anything to get it. They do not care about what you care about, GDP, world peace, knowledge. They only care about avoiding the gallows and stopping a mob of their own people from clubbing them to death in the streets. Your own people hate you. They do not want you around. If you really want to help people, leave. Retire to Singapore or Malaysia or Brunei or Auckland and learn to leave other people alone. They're fine without you. With you is a living waking nightmare.
nirui 5y 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.
- Ericson2314 5y 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 5y 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.
- MichaelZuo 5y ago
  Does this “ACFTU” have any searchable records, court cases, etc.? (In Chinese or English)
duxup 5y 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 5y ago
The 996 Github Repo is one of the Top Starred https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU
vmception 5y 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 5y ago
So they just tell employees to leave one minute before 9pm.
illuminati1911 5y 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.
- raincom 5y 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 5y 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?
    - raincom 5y ago
      Almost everyone accept what you say. Somehow, the capital class, and the intellectual class (media) heavily discount it.
      - yourapostasy 5y ago
        > Somehow, the capital class, and the intellectual class (media) heavily discount it. For the capital class, IBGYBG by the time the wheels of sustainability of the situation fall off the cart, and in their mind they'll "simply" switch to the new dominant player; I believe they vastly underestimate switching costs and fungibility of their capital in China. For the media, they say what the capital class pays them to say.
WiSaGaN 5y 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.
- bobthepanda 5y 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.
- hkmaxpro 5y 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 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 5y ago
This happened on the same day the US Supreme Court decided to make 5-10 million Americans homeless.
Ericson2314 5y ago
According to the basic argument of https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300244175/trade-wars-are-class-wars 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.

393 points by hkmaxpro 5y 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 5y 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.
- secondaryacct 5y 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.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    > simple: we emigrate to China Let us know how simple this works out in practice.
    - feu 5y ago
      It wasn't especially difficult pre-COVID. I know a few people from the UK and Bulgaria who have done so.
      - usr1106 5y ago
        Yes. And I know some who returned around 2018ish because the oppression was growing a lot.
      - kwere 5y ago
        Unless You go here with investiment Money Is difficult to get permits
mschuster91 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
It's an instance of Prisoner's dilemma.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
simonh 5y 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.
- pjc50 5y 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.
  - owlmirror 5y ago
    You must ask yourself what is the reason that people in London have more money. Purchasing power is not something that manifests itself out of thin air, as well as exchange rates of money. An economy in which the people have multiple times the purchasing power must do something right. And moving people in that economy around is more valuable than moving people elsewhere.
    - z2 5y ago
      For instance, having a century headstart in industrialization and fast economic growth? It actually returns to a longer scale version of having accumulated wealth through working a long time... Also taxi driving isn't exactly the most efficient of markets to compare value. London taxi drivers for example have a unique barrier to entry to become a taxi driver via an onerous road memorization test ("The Knowledge"), and that has nothing to do with the general British economy "doing something right."
logicchains 5y 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/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2020/
- alasdair_ 5y ago
  Is the birthrate still falling now that the “one child” policy is no more?
  - kwere 5y ago
    Kids are too expensive: there Is no welfare, highest taxes of the world and wages are "depressed" to keep competivity combinerà with real estate kegabubble and education really expensive from infancy
tellersid 5y 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 5y ago
  Did you just call Rocky IV "a tale as old as human history?"
  - throwaway284534 5y ago
    Well, to be generous, Gilgamesh did suffer from a boredom so severe that his own people begged the gods to bring him an equal. After Enkidu showed up, he spent more time adventuring and fighting mythical creatures, instead of wrestling the townsfolk and enjoying the perks of prima nocta.
harryh 5y 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_working_hours_1950-2014.png/440px-US_working_hours_1950-2014.png 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 5y 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.
  - flerchin 5y ago
    I've got my finger on the pulse of spicy memes, and I've never seen a God Emperor one. Is this some kind of Trumpist thing?
  - harryh 5y ago
    For most of history, when a society gets richer, the rich enslave more people and consolidate power This is not true. The enormous rise in wealth of the world in the 20th/21st centuries has coincided with large increases in personal freedoms as well. At any rate, I'm not sure a graph from the US starting at 1950 is sufficient for establishing historical trends. The trend is consistent with other datasets: https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours
- throwaway769879 5y 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.
tomp 5y 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!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kilroy123 5y 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?
- yourapostasy 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.

secondaryacct 5y 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 5y 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.
- nix23 5y 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.

stefan_ 5y 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 5y ago
I hear slavery is an even bigger competitive advantage. Moritz should chain himself to his desk if he really wants to succeed.

danielovichdk 5y ago

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

secondaryacct 5y ago
Work 996 at home ?
npteljes 5y 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.
- kamray23 5y 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 5y 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...
hkmaxpro 5y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/avoidchineseproducts/ https://www.reddit.com/r/avoidchineseproducts/

runawaybottle 5y 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 5y ago

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

rfoo 5y 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.
- enkid 5y 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.
  - p_l 5y ago
    There is apparently a recent push to go after exploitative practices of big giants, including also in terms of labour policies (including treatment of delivery workers). And if you want a cynical reading - the companies that are famous for 996 are also the kind of companies that are recently getting reminders that they do not guide the policy in the country, so it's beneficial for the party to actually prosecute them.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

ausudhz 5y ago

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

tellersid 5y 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.
feu 5y 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.
logicchains 5y 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.
- rvba 5y 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.
  - bingohbangoh 5y ago
    There are vanishingly few bank jobs and so the hazing process to get them is brutal. The banks push their associates to work 80hr/wk because they can. Technologists, for instance, don't work these hours (something closer to 60hr/wk in my experience). The 996 phenomenon seems to be more common. It's as if every job put you through the ringer.
- ausudhz 5y 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)

pdimitar 5y 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.

kamray23 5y 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?
- pdimitar 5y 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 5y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

SSLy 5y ago
It says so in the article too
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
opan 5y 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 5y ago
I was confused by this as well until it was cleared up in the first sentence of the article.
freebee87 5y 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.

tuatoru 5y 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 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTJPM647S 2. Japan's population pyramid for comparison: https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/2019/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/2019/ 3. China's population pyramid: https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2019/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2019/

redis_mlc 5y ago

The article didn't mention the real reason for moving away from 996. The current unemployment rate is over 20%. (They call it the "flexible market.") And China might be called a Communist country, but there's few benefits unless you're a CCP member.

defaultprimate 5y ago

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

mathattack 5y 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.

akomtu 5y 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.

burnished 5y 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?

steve76 5y ago

If people you hate, like big oil or the police ran a tabloid, would you believe it? That's what you are reading here. You think they are honest? The only thing their leadership cares about is the facade of legitimacy. They will say and do anything to get it. They do not care about what you care about, GDP, world peace, knowledge. They only care about avoiding the gallows and stopping a mob of their own people from clubbing them to death in the streets. Your own people hate you. They do not want you around. If you really want to help people, leave. Retire to Singapore or Malaysia or Brunei or Auckland and learn to leave other people alone. They're fine without you. With you is a living waking nightmare.

nirui 5y 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.

Ericson2314 5y 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 5y 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.
MichaelZuo 5y ago
Does this “ACFTU” have any searchable records, court cases, etc.? (In Chinese or English)

duxup 5y 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 5y ago

The 996 Github Repo is one of the Top Starred https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU

vmception 5y 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 5y ago

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

illuminati1911 5y 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.

raincom 5y 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 5y 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?
  - raincom 5y ago
    Almost everyone accept what you say. Somehow, the capital class, and the intellectual class (media) heavily discount it.
    - yourapostasy 5y ago
      > Somehow, the capital class, and the intellectual class (media) heavily discount it. For the capital class, IBGYBG by the time the wheels of sustainability of the situation fall off the cart, and in their mind they'll "simply" switch to the new dominant player; I believe they vastly underestimate switching costs and fungibility of their capital in China. For the media, they say what the capital class pays them to say.

WiSaGaN 5y 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.

bobthepanda 5y 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.
hkmaxpro 5y 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 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 5y ago

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

Ericson2314 5y ago

According to the basic argument of https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300244175/trade-wars-are-class-wars 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.