On the first working day of 2021, a revelation on Gongmai App made workers’ hearts cool again. A 22-year-old employee of Pinduoduo has died after collapsing on his way home from work in the early hours of the morning, according to the report. The last note signed by the girl, who died at a job in the Duoduo grocery business in Xinjiang province, reads, “Take borders for Duoduo.”
This is not an isolated case. On Pulse, an APP that focuses on workplace social networking, countless workers wear anonymous vests to tell their workplace stories every day. Why has a social APP become a workplace tree hole for young people? Will the 996 overtime system, which has gradually become the norm, have a new trend in the New Year in everyone’s anonymous ridicule?
Salary and life, only one can play more?
The news of the sudden death of pinduoduo employees prompted a wave of online attacks on the company. In the initial ferment of the incident, a related topic was set up by netizens, with employees of major Internet companies angrily denouncing the incident anonymously.
Adding fuel to the fire, a screenshot of Zhihu that appeared to have been deleted after the official response from Panyu was posted online shortly after the incident was revealed, in which the response read: “Look at the people at the bottom of the society, who are not exchanging their lives for money. I never thought it was a problem of capital, but of the society.”
As the apparent response was too cold to believe it was a public response from an Internet company, some netizens began to speculate that the image had been photoshopped.
At around 4pm, the company released an official response saying that the employee, who joined The company in July 2019, had been cremated on January 3 after his death on December 29, and attached was a screenshot of his father’s moments.
In an interview with Caixin online. According to Ping-Duo, the female employee left work in the wee hours of the morning as a normal working hour. “The work schedule in Xinjiang is a little different from Beijing time. Dinner is at about 9 o ‘clock, and 1 am is about 11 o ‘clock Beijing time.”
In its response, Pinduoduo also insisted that the screenshots previously circulated online were rumors.
But zhihu officials immediately came forward to play pinduoduo, “Pinduoduo” is a registered user of Zhihu, whose identity is true and correct. Zhihu has a strict identity authentication process and mechanism. At 8:19:49 on The 4th, “Pongduo” created and answered… At 8:20 am and 17 seconds on Tuesday, Pinduoduo deleted the above reply by itself.
Thus, the “screenshot storm” was audible for the gavel. Looking back, though, the Internet reaction was fueled in part by lingering resentment over the 996 overtime culture, and in part by the fact that this isn’t the first time panyu employees have teased the company on a personal level.
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During the outbreak of the epidemic at the beginning of 2020, some pinduoduo employees posted anonymous posts on weibo, saying that “the company has recently voluntarily dismissed employees for various reasons” and “the three-year contract will not be renewed after expiration”. Moreover, during the epidemic period, Pinduoduo forced employees to leave their jobs in a disguised way by not issuing public announcements and calling directly to inform them to return to work. Meanwhile, Huang Zheng, CEO of Pinduoduo, said on the Q4 earnings call that “most of the company’s employees will get a raise and will not be asked to bear the impact of the epidemic.”
After the storm of layoffs, Pinduoduo was found to be stuck with employees who did not give certificates of departure. Leaving Pinduoduo is like a game of passing through: you must provide an offer from your next employer, and you can’t go to Alibaba, JD, Toutiao, Kuaishou and other Internet companies, or you will start a non-compete agreement.
According to the pinduoduo competition agreement, it basically covers all the major enterprises in the field of Internet e-commerce in contemporary China.
Ironically, during the Q4 earnings call, Huang said, “Pinduoduo’s most valuable asset is people. We should praise, reward and embrace those colleagues who work silently and create value.”
Is pulse a workplace tree hole or a new flaunt wealth platform?
Several of Pinduoduo’s labor relations incidents from last year to this year have sparked discussion on various social media platforms, but it is interesting to note that almost all of the Revelations came from the same platform — pulse. In the past few years, many major events in the Internet circle, such as the conflict between Letv and the widespread corruption of ofo, all originated from the anonymous speech area. Not only that, just log in on any typical workday and you’ll see countless Internet company employees in anonymous vests telling their workplace stories.
So how did Mai Mai go from being a networking APP to a tree hole for workers to vent their workplace woes?
Real-name authentication is an important reason why people are willing to talk and listen on the pulse. Like linkedin, which is also a social networking APP for the workplace, Pulse decided from the start that every user should use his or her real name, company and job title when they sign up, and it also provided real-name authentication.
Real-name authentication, on the one hand, enables Pulse to provide users with higher-quality contacts; on the other hand, it also makes users’ Revelations, jokes and shares more authentic. Lin Fan, pulsar’s CEO, also mentioned in an interview that as a community with a full real name, pulsar can minimize the possibility of users spreading rumors. “On the platform, everyone has an identity, and his identity determines that he will not make random remarks.”
The real-name system can guarantee the authenticity of information, but the establishment of anonymous community is the fundamental reason why workers dare to speak their minds. Whether it is pinduoduo this storm or before a number of Internet company gossip, in fact, are from the same section of the “job”. In this community, every registered user can wear an anonymous vest — either an employee of XX Company or a random screen name — and speak freely in it. Other users can interact with you, but never know your real identity.
After all, while most people feel the urge to share their career stories, the urge may not be as strong if they risk being read about by their boss and co-workers.
There are a variety of jokes about the workplace from the perspective of workers, covering almost every aspect of the job. After a careful review, we can roughly sum up the following categories:
Workplace heartbreak: If you take a look at all the talk in anonymous forums, “overtime” is probably the most frequently mentioned word. Of course, the hardships of working in the workplace are not limited to working overtime, failing to find a job, losing a job, not finding a partner…
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Experience sharing: What’s not to step on during an interview? Which company has the most overtime? Enthusiastic workers are always willing to share their experiences.
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Gossips: Whether it is the game between various companies or the fate of the top management, as long as you have a question on the subject, you can always wait for the “relevant person” to reply xiang to clarify the ba gu for you.
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Silent flaunt wealth: of course, in today’s world where every social APP will eventually become a flaunt wealth platform, there’s also an obscure flaunt wealth fanologist on the pulse.
This one, for example, appears to be joking about not having a girlfriend, but actually wants to secretly share his monthly salary. No wonder some people say that without a salary of 500,000 yuan a year, they are too embarrassed to mention their salary level.
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Are the 996 and the size of the week really the welfare of the community animals?
Of course, the bantering takes different forms, but most of the stories in both Mai Mai and Douban’s “This Little Thing about Going to work” group point to the same theme: the 996 has overwhelmed young people who have been trading their lives for money.
According to one former employee, 996 first appeared in October 2013, when the alibaba group proposed a six-day work week to fight WeChat and launch its own messaging and social networking platform. The term is most commonly known in China. In early 2019, several programmers created a project on GitHub called “Work 996 sick ICU”, which quickly struck a chord with a large number of Chinese programmers. In just three days, the number of stars added to the project exceeded 100,000.
Over the past few years, the 996 work pattern has spread from programmer to other jobs at Internet companies, and from Internet companies to many other industries. On the whole, no matter how popular the 996 is, in previous years it has remained an unspoken fact of working people; But starting in 2019, the 996 has slowly become a requirement and slogan for the company’s recruitment.
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In the recruitment requirement of Zhaopin, CSM directly states “can accept 996 working mode”; Jia Guolong, Xibei’s founder, claimed on social media that his company’s working model was 715: working seven days a week, 15 hours a day, and always meeting together at night. In December 2020, Mr. Liu Feng, the hr director of Kuaishou, announced at the staff meeting that starting from January 10, 2021, Kuaishou will start the working mode of “week” for all employees.
Just when you thought “big and small” was stifling enough, Internet companies have invented something even scareer — the super big and small week: seven days a week, six days a week. That means you have to work 13 days in a row to get a day off.
In a 2019 post, Ma once said: “Today BAT companies in China can be 996, I think it is the good fortune of us people to repair.” While controversial, it also points to why many employees at Internet companies are willing to suffer through the 996 ordeal: high pay somehow makes the system “reasonable”.
After entering the 21st century, China’s Internet industry has been in the stage of booming development. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the average salary of the software and information technology industry was 133,000 yuan in 2017, surpassing the financial industry to become the most profitable industry in China for two consecutive years. Some start-ups become multimillionaires after their companies go public, and the story of realizing the freedom of wealth has attracted millions of people to enter the Internet industry with a “go for it, bike for bike” mentality.
“Love” is also a common phrase used by bosses to rationalize 996. During the same internal sharing session, Ma also said: “I hope Ali people love what you do. If you don’t love it, even eight hours is too long. “There’s no such thing as 996; If you don’t like it or love it, every minute at work is torture.”
Such encouragement may sound groundless, but a study by Aaron Kay, a professor at Duke University’s Business School, found that a new form of exploitation has emerged in modern society: exploitation by passion. Those who are exploited tend to see their exploitation (unpaid work, low pay, overtime on their days off, demands for work beyond their duty, etc.) as justified by a love of work (whether genuine or simply the result of prolonged exposure).
Some employers in the treatment of some energetic employees, often will certainly increase their workload is not given to match the material rewards, this creates a more serious phenomenon: at work tend to be exploited in the employees who is enthusiastic about his work, for being exploiters, his condition will be since the others impression on him and become worse and worse.
In such an environment that emphasizes passion and passion, Aaron does not want to oppose passion itself. “Of course, loving your work is a good thing, but when we see the workplace as a place to pursue passion, there is a price to pay. There is ample evidence that people who love their jobs can benefit in many ways. But it is also a warning that we should not allow passion at work to be exploited illegally, to justify exploitation or to legitimise injustice.”
Where else can migrant workers escape?
With the Internet industry slowing and wages stagnating, this 996 mode of work seems increasingly intolerable.
A programmer in an interview with the sanlian life weekly “said:” the market is not only in one direction, China’s Internet industry to enjoy the high speed development of 20 years, we used are used to think, think every year’s wages and benefits, but who told you that programmers condition treatment will be more and more good?”
The same pessimism is spreading among China’s white-collar workers, as the Internet industry saw an outflow of talent in 2019, according to Pulse’s Report on Talent Migration and Flow Trends 2020. It is clear, however, that workers who are used to getting results through hard work have yet to find a way out of the 996, although Japan, Europe and the United States, which have had similar labor conflicts, have provided an answer.
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In the 1980s, after the implementation of neoliberal economic policies, The Japanese economy experienced a successful reconstruction, but it also caused a huge gap between the rich and the poor. Junzhao Komaki, a Japanese economist, wrote in his book The Lattice Chai Society: “In today’s America and Japan, the bigger cake does not benefit the bottom, but only the top. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”
A yawning gap between rich and poor and an unpromising path to promotion has left a large number of young Japanese losing their enthusiasm for working overtime and opting instead for “no marriage, no childbearing”. Social scholars chun-ling li with a woeful writers sassou-nguesso once analysis in the bad society: “look from sociology, 996 in Japan is very failure, work hard to make money ‘overfatigue Japan’ and ‘low desire to Japan are closely related: today young people see their parents so old to so hard, just choose low desire, not choice is not marriage infertility.”
In Europe and the US, stagnant income growth and increasing overtime hours have also raised questions about the value of white-collar work. The American anthropologist David Graeber cited a 2015 survey of Britons by an analysis firm in which 37 per cent of respondents said their work made no useful contribution to the world, while 13 per cent said they were unsure.
The research results of gray supporting the theory of “shit”, namely the technology progress and did not help the human to realize automation British economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930 forecast work 15 hours a week, people face, just more and more long working hours and more and more meaningless job – many of these appear in the private sector, they are not out of economic need, but in order to maintain competition and hierarchy of capitalism.
In China, the fate of migrant workers has not yet a clear direction, but it is undeniable that most people have realized that under the high-pressure overtime system, the bright future will not come automatically, and the development of the society actually depends on the choices and actions of everyone at present.
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