Employees died of overwork, committed suicide under stress, and were promptly fired for discussing 996, the recent labor scandal of Chinese Internet major Jindo. Why are Chinese companies trampling on labor laws with impunity while regulators are silent about it? Scholars say that in China, where capital controls survival, labor rights are violated as a systemic and institutional problem.
A Weibo user named “Wang Taixu wray” recently posted a confession video, saying he was interviewed by his supervisor for anonymously posting a photo of a colleague being carried to an ambulance on the work communication software Pulse. Wang Taixu said that Poundland forced him to leave his job voluntarily on the grounds of smearing the company’s image, and when he refused, Poundland immediately dismissed him. In addition, the company supervisor threatened that when the next company he worked for came to conduct a background check, Poundland would state this and put it in his file. Wang Taixu said that the efficiency from posting the photo to being kicked out of the company took only 30 minutes: “Is it reasonable for a company to solve a problem not by solving the problem itself, but by solving the person who brought it up for everyone to see?”
Pindo then responded that it fired Wang for posting “extreme remarks” with malicious intent, violating the code of conduct in the employee handbook, and claimed that Wang’s claims of 300 working hours were untrue.
Wang Taixu, in the capacity of a frontline employee, disclosed the working environment inside Poundland, where employees in Poundland’s Shanghai headquarters are forced to work 300 hours a month, while the department where the Poundland employee who died of overwork recently worked, “Poundland Buy”, requires employees to work 380 hours a month, and if the hours are not up to standard, they will be interviewed by their superiors about whether the work is unsaturated.
In the early hours of December 29 last year, a 22-year-old employee from Xinjiang died suddenly on his way home from a late night overtime shift. No coincidence, on the 9th of this month, another Poundland employee jumped to his death in his home in Changsha.
In addition, Wang Taixu said, not only does Poundland deduct employees’ right to take holidays and transfers, and arbitrarily extend the year-end bonus payment date, but also forces employees to move into the office building floor that still smells of chemicals; there are very few bathroom pits in Poundland’s headquarters, so employees have to go to other floors or shopping malls to use the toilet; the company provides work meals with quality problems such as expired food and corruption.
Wang Taixu commented on this, saying that Poundland lacked care for its employees: “Poundland, the bottomless capital, began to revel in the fact that they found such a company in China that could almost slavishly force the country’s almost smartest group of people to ‘996’ until they died. “
Wang Taixu said that labor arbitration has been filed against Poundland. But the chances of winning are slim because of the lack of recorded evidence of being threatened.
A young employee of Chinese e-commerce giant “Jindo” died suddenly on his way home after working overtime until the early hours of the morning. (Online photo)
Li Qiang, head of the U.S.-based human rights group China Labor Watch, told the station that Chinese-owned companies, such as JMDODO, hire large teams of lawyers to weigh the terms of labor contracts with their employees before signing them, in order to circumvent labor laws. Li Qiang said that it is because the supply of labor in China exceeds demand that applicants have to accept bullying terms such as overtime. At the same time, China’s labor unions are unable to play a role in fighting for the legal rights of employees, thus leading to increasingly unbalanced labor-management relations: “The role of unions in this process is very weak, for example, before you sign a contract, the union can see if the contract is in line with labor laws, but now the unions in Poundland are controlled by company directors, and in this case labor-management relations are unbalanced. “
Li Qiang said, China’s union representatives are appointed by the government and management, lack of representation. In contrast, in developed Western countries, union representatives are publicly elected by workers, which is impossible to achieve in China. Therefore, the inability of China’s labor laws and official unions to truly protect workers is a systemic institutional problem, and the imbalance in labor-management relations cannot be solved until the system is reformed: “China’s unions are different in that it is the Chinese Communist Party that appoints a person to Poundland, and Poundland forms the unions, which lack representation. This incident can also be seen as a drawback of China’s one-party dictatorship system; it’s not just Jindo, it’s the whole system in China that’s wrong, especially in terms of labor protection.”
Li Hengqing, director of the Institute for Information and Strategic Studies in Washington, D.C., told the station that the trampling of labor rights not only contradicts labor laws, but also contradicts the party constitution of the Communist Party of China: “The party constitution of the Communist Party of China begins by saying that the Communist Party of China is the representative of the Chinese working class and is a political party based on the worker-peasant alliance. In terms of the party constitution, it should protect workers and labor. But as we can see from social practice, the party actually only protects the powerful and the rich, and the enterprises linked to the powerful capital.”
Li Hengqing said that the role of trade unions is irreplaceable in labor-management relations. Precisely because of the fierce vicious competition within the labor force and the minimal power of individuals in the process of wrestling with capital, people like Wang Taixu who are fighting for their legitimate labor rights should unite and put pressure on capital to make concessions: “In principle, the only way to protect labor rights is by trade unions, and the official trade unions in China now do not represent workers’ interests at all; trade unions In fact, the unions should be on the side of the workers, and by uniting together to avoid individual competition and to participate in collective competition, they have the power to negotiate. Only when we are all united can we solve the problem of labor imbalance and fight for our rights and interests by spontaneous, independent unions that we have created ourselves.”
Recent Comments