Despite the written law, employees are frequently discouraged from filing for overtime. Their success is instead equated with elevating China’s image abroad and fundamental to the country’s economic growth and innovation story.Ī reason why such companies do not get penalized may be due to their professed nature of work and the legal workaround. Yet, leading employers in the technology sector, such as the video app TikTok creator Bytedance, the telecom firm Huawei, and the e-commerce platform Pinduoduo have been blacklisted by past and current employees as places where working overtime is the norm. Businesses must restrict overtime to 36 hours a month. Their real needs should be considered.” What China’s labor law says about overtimeĬhinese law says that employees should not be asked to work more than eight hours a day or 40 hours a week. The discussion has since gained widespread attention on social media and users on Github have compiled a blacklist of over 150 companies that push their employees to do overtime or work excessive hours.Īnd, last Sunday, China’s state-run paper, the People’s Daily, joined the conversation with its editorial stating: “Employees who object to 996 cannot be labelled as ‘slackers’ or ‘not fighters’. They started a project “996.icu”, a play on the fact that working such long hours could very well land an employee in the intensive care unit. In late March, a group of software developers took to protesting the 996 work culture on the code-hosting platform Github. That doesn’t mean there is no lack of resentment. Today, Chinese tech employees are increasingly looking at wage ceilings and lesser perks, having to settle with simply being gainfully employed. The combination of these stressors means that tech firms are having to squeeze more work out of employees or lower costs by cutting down on benefits and bonuses, which previously comforted young workers sacrificing any work-life balance to achieve personal growth targets. Here, Beijing’s goals of job creation and support for business seems to be cancelled out by the crackdown on content deemed ‘harmful, vulgar, or misleading’. Market research firm Preqin recently reported that funding in the sector has declined 12 percent to US$18.3 billion the number of venture capital deals fell 25 percent year-on-year to 713 in Q4 last year.īesides global headwinds, China’s technology sector has also had to contend with tightening government regulations, affecting several sub-sectors, from the gaming industry to news aggregator platforms to education apps. The slowdown in China has resulted in a hiring freeze in the tech sector with more layoffs than usual. According to jobs platform Zhaopin, intense competition for job vacancies in China’s tech companies and startups saw an average applicants-to-jobs ratio of 32 to 1 in 2019. Moreover, for those looking to switch jobs, the situation has turned grim in the past year and a half as overall growth has slowed and a course correction seems underway in terms of the valuation of startup entities and venture capital available. Very often, key promotions or even retaining jobs means putting in overtime to prove the employee’s worth. Many companies offer their employees a suite of facilities – such as gyms, nap rooms, and laundry services – to further encourage them to spend long hours at the office.Īnd the slog isn’t limited to junior employees – most senior executives and managers work more than ‘996’ hours, even during weekends. Jack Ma himself celebrates the constant grind because he believes that it has been integral to the successes of unicorns like Alibaba and Tencent.Įmployees at most tech companies are either encouraged or required to put in long, unpaid hours to show their commitment to their jobs and loyalty to the company. The grueling work ethic is both defended and eulogized by employers in China’s technology sector as the very reason for its sudden and accelerated growth over the last 10 years. Why the 996 work culture will not end anytime soon In a WeChat post under the pen name of Bai Ya, Zhu Ning, the founder and chief executive of Hangzhou-based e-commerce firm Youzan, said that his company’s human resources department informed every new hire that working at Youzan meant “huge pressure, where many have already treated long work hours as a habit and can’t really tell work and life apart”. Richard Liu, the founder of the Chinese e-commerce company JD.com, added his own two cents by calling employees who seek work-life balance as “slackers” who were not welcome at his company. His advice to complaining workers was modeled in the rhetoric that’s become commonplace in China’s tech sector – “How do you achieve the success you want without paying extra effort and time?” Last week, Alibaba founder Jack Ma made a bold statement on his blog defending the notoriously grueling ‘996’ work culture – working 12 hours a day (9 am to 9 pm) and six days a week.
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