Chinese authorities say overtime '996' policy is illegal

I wonder if this will be good or bad for the competitiveness of China if they are able to enforce it.<p>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&#x27;t necessarily make you more productive, as has been discussed in tech communities for a while now.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>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?<p>That seems to be the problem for the CCP in general. They want to make improvements, but they don&#x27;t really get to the root of the problem. They crack down on after-school tutoring for instance, but they don&#x27;t change the Gaokao system, so tutoring will just go underground.

As a Chinese myself, I&#x27;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&#x27;s literal means, so that&#x27;s a cognitive pass, congrats!<p>However, let&#x27;s don&#x27;t forget that you cannot form labor union without blessings from the party. Let&#x27;s also don&#x27;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.<p>There is a labor union in China of course, The labor union, called ACFTU, or All-China Federation of Trade Unions. I don&#x27;t remember when was the last time they actually sued someone&#x2F;company, maybe never.<p>Personally, I don&#x27;t think those paper laws and paper institutions are actually there to serve the general public. So I don&#x27;t even care what they&#x27;ve said, nothing will change for the better.

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: &quot;but it works for us&quot;.<p>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.<p>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 &quot;stay competitive&quot;.<p>In the face of bankcruptcy or market pressure... managers tend to make irrational and&#x2F;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.

For anyone that does not know:<p>&gt; <i>The 996 working hour system (Chinese: 996工作制) is a work schedule practiced by some companies in the People&#x27;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]</i><p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;996_working_hour_system" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;996_working_hour_system</a>

I’ve been working in software engineering in China for few years now. Never worked for 996 company, but I know many who do.<p>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.<p>I find it ridiculous how random business managers in EU and US say this shit show would be competitive advantage. It’s everything but.<p>That being said China has several real competitive advantages over western countries, but media rarely speaks about then.

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

I had been waiting for the next announcement. This is the latest move in a series in service of the overarching policy, &quot;increase fertility&quot;.<p>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.<p>At the time the party responded by altering the one child policy to two children.<p>Since then it&#x27;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.)<p>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).<p>This year the party has:<p>- 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.<p>- publicly compared video games to opium (which probably has immense cultural resonance), and acted to limit on-line shopping&#x2F;personal finance-- both alternative uses of time to the &quot;delights of domestic society&quot;.<p>- 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.)<p>----<p>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.<p>It will also have to act to curb housing prices (Chinese men basically can&#x27;t get a partner unless they own housing), and it will have to raise retirement ages and introduce a pension so that people don&#x27;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.)<p>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&#x27;s difficult to lift fertility to two or more children.<p>1. Japan&#x27;s working age population: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;LFWA64TTJPM647S" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;LFWA64TTJPM647S</a><p>2. Japan&#x27;s population pyramid for comparison: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.populationpyramid.net&#x2F;japan&#x2F;2019&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.populationpyramid.net&#x2F;japan&#x2F;2019&#x2F;</a><p>3. China&#x27;s population pyramid: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.populationpyramid.net&#x2F;china&#x2F;2019&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.populationpyramid.net&#x2F;china&#x2F;2019&#x2F;</a>

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.<p>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.

The 996 Github Repo is one of the Top Starred<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;996icu&#x2F;996.ICU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;996icu&#x2F;996.ICU</a>

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.

CCP starts looking like a US corporation. Their PR department says &quot;996 policy is illegal&quot; 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.

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

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

According to the basic argument of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yalebooks.yale.edu&#x2F;book&#x2F;9780300244175&#x2F;trade-wars-are-class-wars" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yalebooks.yale.edu&#x2F;book&#x2F;9780300244175&#x2F;trade-wars-are...</a> I think stuff like this is a really good sign for employees everywhere.<p>I hope it puts some pressure on Japan and Korea too.

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

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

Is this enforced then &#x2F; complied with?<p>I know that historically Chinese judiciary has little power of its own. I&#x27;m wondering how likely anything changes here.

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

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

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

Illegal in favor of….?<p>In accordance with which law?<p>Was it too much work?<p>Too little work?<p>Overtime benefits miscalculated?<p>Does China’s legal system have that much nuance?<p>The <i>Reuters</i> article doesnt say!

And it was so before, just like 4+ hours unpaid overtimes at sweatshops.<p>What matters is them suddenly remembering it after decades of busting unions, and any labour activism protesting it.<p>Clearly, they want to mop the floor with tech companies for them becoming bigger than the &quot;sun king.&quot;<p>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.

Making something illegal is only weakly correlated to companies stopping the practice.<p>I hope this is not just virtue signalling; the CCP has a reputation of hitting hard once it makes up its mind.<p>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 <i>huge</i>.