
Young Chinese are sick of working long hours - bill38
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180508-young-chinese-are-sick-of-working-overtime
======
nimbius
As 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.

~~~
mjevans
I'd like to see three things to solve this kind of issue.

1) The elimination of unpaid overtime for anyone that isn't a 'corporate
office able to hire employees at will'.

2) Required 'typical hours' in employment contracts; companies can't pay out
less than this unless the employee agrees, and the employee cannot be forced
to work MORE unless they agree.

3) All firings have to be for cause.

~~~
briandear
All firings for cause will reduce hiring. It will create more illiquidity in
the labor market, drive down wages and reduce mobility and efficiency. Look at
the French labor market if you want to see how that nightmare plays out. 10%+
unemployment and a vast increase in time-limited, non-permanent work.

I don’t owe you a job. If I don’t need you any more, why the hell should I be
forced to owe you?

Are you required to buy the same amount of groceries each week? Why not? Same
for labor. When you need less, you buy less, when you need more, you buy more.

~~~
mjevans
I'm not an expert on that; however wouldn't the issue be with the /difficulty/
in firing, not the fact that it merely has to be documented and for a 'valid'
reason? Though now that you mention it, such reasons probably should be
regulated the same way sealed court records are; unless challenged in a
lawsuit.

Also, from the perspective of an employer, a valid reason very well could be
the end of the project that a contract is for; such a termination / re-
evaluation date should be built in to the contact and clear up front.

~~~
tekknik
That’s more laying off than firing. Forcing a cause to fire/lay off someone
makes the company think long and hard before hiring you since they’ll be stuck
with you, therefore less hiring. Not to mention “unfirable” workers leads to
less quality.

------
marsrover
> 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.

~~~
thaumasiotes
A credential in "English" isn't the exemplar of self-indulgence that it would
be in the US, where everybody already knows English and "English" as a school
subject just means literature.

Knowing English in China has real, immediate financial benefits. For any given
job (programmer / secretary / waitress / anything), a role that involves
having to communicate with English speakers is more prestigious and offers
higher pay.

~~~
kccqzy
Every college student already knows English. It's a required subject in high
schools. Anecdotally I do know of a Chinese student majoring in English in
college telling me the best part of her college life is reading Dickens all
day.

~~~
thaumasiotes
It is true that English is a required subject in Chinese high schools. This no
more means that all Chinese college students can speak English than US high
school foreign language requirements mean that American college students can
all speak Spanish.

~~~
DmenshunlAnlsis
You’re right about most of that, and if you look at Japan it’s a similar
situation with a similar outcome. It is however also not true that Americans
have to take Spanish, they could just as easily take Latin.

~~~
zdragnar
That depends heavily on where you go. My high school only offered German and
Spanish. I think a few years after I graduated they added either Japanese or
Chinese, though that's because our school district was growing significantly
year over year.

If you're not in a large school district / large city, your options as a
student in a public school (and most private ones) are quite limited indeed.

------
eumenides1
“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?

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Yet the executives and CEO who all benefit directly from unpaid overtime tool
around in Maserati's and vacation on Greek islands, but surely that's not
"self centered." Surely, capitalist culture has never, ever idolized self-
centeredness and entitlement!

China has the same problems the West has. We see labor as this fungible thing
done by faceless automatons and its the job of management to extract as much
labor as possible to enrich those above them by any means possible. Its
considered perfectly normal and moral to have a class of people worrying daily
about their bills and keeping a roof in their head and a whole other class who
we defend when they scream at the valet or the housekeeper because some
trivial thing bothered them. We equate both those situations as the same thus
barely being able to feed your kids is on the same level of outrage as 'you
scuffed by Maserati's brake pedal with your boots!'

I don't envy the Chinese as they seem to have few fewer avenues to labor
enrichment than the West, but fundamentally we all share the same problem: the
one-sided relationship between capital and labor. Ironically, their country
was built on addressing that fundamental problem but now have fallen into the
same dirty form of capatalism everyone else has.

~~~
prolikewhoa
>Ironically, their country was built on addressing that fundamental problem
but now have fallen into the same dirty form of capatalism everyone else has.

I laugh when people call it Communist.

Do workers own the means of production? No. Not Communist.

------
patrickg_zill
NASA 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/v5...](http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/52/v52i07p246-263.pdf)
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
I'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.

~~~
atom-morgan
At least in America, isn't it a product of FDR?

~~~
danharaj
No, it's a product of violent riots and union action where thousands of
workers died at the hands of police and hired guns.

~~~
patrickg_zill
I don't quite see this adding up to "thousands" i.e. more than 1999 people,
even if you double it for not being an exhaustive list:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_Unite...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_United_States_labor_disputes)

~~~
danharaj
Correct, I meant to say where thousands of workers mobilized, some of which
died or were injured.

------
1_800_UNICORN
Very 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".

~~~
ekianjo
> This is a case of basic human rights.

There's no such things as "human rights standards" for how much you should
work per week. For most of human history people lived in abject misery and
precariousness and in comparison 72 hours a week and most folks having all the
comfort of modern city life is not as bad as it sounds like.

~~~
danharaj
There were periods in medieval history when a typical peasant only worked ~150
days out of the year.

While you are right that life was difficult, your sense of the past is warped
to the point of caricature.

~~~
ekianjo
yeah and they had nothing to eat at all some years if the harvest was bad, and
no medical care and most people died in their 30s. So, which scenario do you
prefer?

~~~
danharaj
Ok, so now you're making an observation about medicine instead of hours of
work. What exactly is your point here? Things are better now than they were in
the past, so there's no reason why they should be better?

~~~
ekianjo
I mentioned harvests which have nothing to do with medicine. I know we don't
suffer from famines nowadays but this was a real thing before.

------
ggregoire
I'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.

------
teknopaul
I 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
I'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
> 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
yes, 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.

------
cossatot
Sort 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?

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Chengdu 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.

------
ChuckMcM
Ok, 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.

------
insensible
Can we get the word Chinese capitalized in the HN title?

------
l5870uoo9y
Wonder 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.

------
IloveHN84
Who's not tired of working overtime?

~~~
collyw
Me. 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
Serious 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
Why 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
He said "actually I think most devs in my country are underpaid".

~~~
mayniac
They 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
I am from the UK working in Spain, I think the UK pays better than here,
though depends on the location.

------
caio1982
One 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.

------
tankerdude
The 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_
"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
There is in fact a Federal law that covers that.

The Fair Labor Standards Act.

[https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=0bd0fa78-f456...](https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=0bd0fa78-f456-4731-a925-cc48c2f94a53)

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-
penal...](https://www.fisherphillips.com/Wage-and-Hour-Laws/flsa-penalties-
increase)

~~~
freeone3000
(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.

------
xenihn
This is a huge issue in Hong Kong and Singapore too. The work hours in both
are crazy.

------
ben509
> 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
What about a 9 hour flight? Bring 2 sets of pilots?

------
m23khan
Can confirm that the 996 schedule is also applied towards a lot of
office+retail jobs in Pakistan.

------
chaostheory
This 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-
ead679...](https://medium.com/building-asana/work-hard-live-well-ead679cb506d)

"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-
residen...](http://www.bcmj.org/article/impact-sleep-deprivation-resident-
physicians-physician-and-patient-safety-it-time-wake-call)

"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.

------
logfromblammo
They should join a union, or form a socialist workers' party, or something.~

~~~
avcdsuia
We are even not allowed to have feminist organizations, any non-governmental
groups with powers are considered threat to this country.

~~~
phyller
It 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
Does 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
That _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
China 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.)

~~~
frockington
If Stalin and Mao got past the precursor stages they might have been able to
starve people even more efficiently!

~~~
logfromblammo
No, frockington.

In true communism, the leaders are no longer necessary; the people will starve
_themselves_ , in the most efficient manner possible.~

------
nebgnahz
It 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.

------
yakuza00000
Poor 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
gosh 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
Last time they stood up to speak, 10,000 students were murdered in public to
make an example. They might think twice now.

~~~
Install_Gentoo
btw, those students were communists protesting the privatization of collective
farms among other things under Deng.

~~~
yorwba
In an authoritarian state, any spontaneous popular movement is dangerous to
the leadership, even if it aligns with their nominal aims (maybe especially
then). The CCP has been "Communist" in name only for a long time, but Deng
Xiaopings market reforms were probably the most obvious breaking point. It's
not unsurprising that students who had been taught about the inevitable
victory of Communism would protest against this change of course, especially
given the surrounding economic instability.

Although Communism and Democracy are frequently seen as opposites in the West,
Chinese propaganda doesn't hesitate to claim Democracy for themselves (there
are elections after all) and volunteering in various state-adjacent
organizations is encouraged. From the point of view of an upstanding party
member, organizing a student rally probably seemed like the right thing to do,
in good old revolutionary tradition.

------
m3kw9
When the rest of the developed world is working 9-5, who wants to work 9-9

------
snambi
Well, everyone is sick of working long hours. Why only Chinese?

------
bantunes
Millennials - the beginning of the end for China's authoritarian government?
:D

------
redleggedfrog
996 doesn't sound a whole lot like a Communist Workers paradise. Time for
another revolution!

------
holydude
It'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.

------
nickthemagicman
Welcome to the club! There's 400 million Americans who feel the exact same
way!

~~~
Freak_NL
Japanese too. Keep in mind that this article is written from a
British/European standpoint, where working overtime is an exception, not the
norm.

~~~
ekianjo
Japanese 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.

~~~
bena
It'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.

