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Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

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Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

#281

Post by animal531 »

andosa wrote: post #277
nimbius wrote: post #56

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 spendi…

The thing I don't get about these stories: don't you have a contract specifying working hours? My contract says 8 hours a day, for x$ per month, this is what we agreed to and this is what I deliver. Asking me to do 12h instead of 8h would be the same as paying me 66% of my salary at the end of the month instead of 100%. That's a blatant breaking of our contract, why would I agree to that?

Imagine that there are 1 million other people exactly as qualified as you and living in your city, who will work under those conditions.

All the power in this case belongs to the employer.

Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

#283

Post by Can_Not »

briandear wrote: post #260
tostitos1979 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why though? I don't think globalization is the culprit.

Central planning is the culprit. The free market works when it is allowed to work.

That's weird, I got the opposite conclusion. I would have thought this happened because China choose to drift back to free markets instead of improving their central planning. The government demanded a larger market for graduations, and the colleges were free to increase their prices. Is that not econ 101 supply and demand? Now the graduates are on the market and whoever wants to hire can pay at a lower market price, and they're even free to not hire if there's extra candidates. Under a good central planning, anyone who really wants a job could be planned a state sponsered job. It doesn't have to be a fake office job or a bureaucratic layer job like in large US corporations, there's actually plenty of science and engineering research that could be worked on, and China has the man power to challenge research in the US. Interestingly enough, a lot of science and research in the US is state sponsered. If it weren't, I wonder if that talent would be employed, working at Starbucks, or building a new Electron MVP to 'disrupt' one stagnant market to replace it with even more stagnant, monthly rental SaaS.

Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

#284

Post by cdelsolar »

xvf22 wrote: post #216
cdelsolar wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most people didn't die in their 30s, if you could make it through childhood you'd usually live to your 60s/70s.

Care to provide a citation or clarify the period you're referring to?

Citation: common knowledge of much higher infant mortality rates throughout history + the intricacies of the mathematical mean

Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

#285

Post by logfromblammo »

jadedhacker wrote: post #279
ben509 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

This is not quite right. The socialists and communists both believe in the overthrow of capitalism, and may have similar ideas about the endpoint, but their means are different. Socialists are peaceful parliamentarians while communists believe in forceful revolution. They have been even more constrained in the wake of the USSR where Lenin advocated the idea of a vanguard party and due to their initial success, other…

When I look at my health care coverage and deductibles, and the cost of tuition, and the prevalence of 30-year mortgages to purchase housing, and the rate of change in measures of wealth inequality, I feel confidence in saying, "not bloody likely".

You're not getting a worker's paradise here unless you shove some people up against the wall.

Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

#286

Post by withdavidli »

mywittyname wrote: post #209
withdavidli wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know many people that are hourly that loves overtime. 1.5x-2x pay means a world of difference to them. Jobs for them ranges from drivers, construction, to programmers. Some are hoarding money for early retirement, just to make more, others are contract basis so earning 2-3x projected amount enables them to take half the year off. This is to the point where many of these friends loathe to take an exempt job because…

These professions also enjoy long periods of downtime. Which is really the important factor. Sure, it sucks working 12 hours days for long periods of time, but the weeks or months long periods of downtime between sessions make them tolerable. I wouldn't mind two weeks of 5x12s followed by a full week off. Floor nurses often work 3x12 shifts, so three 12-hours days with four days off per week. When my partner was a fl…

Yes. Heard of this too, wasn’t top of mind since I don’t have any nurses as friends.

To a lesser extent, there are some government jobs that gives options for 10hr work days so a person works 4 days per week. Shifting the day off for Monday and Friday and add in a few pto days per month, makes it possible to have nearly a week off work every month.

Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

#287

Post by jschwartzi »

throw2016 wrote: post #219
ben509 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is wonderfully ideological. I'm surprised people still believe this stuff. Since I tend to skew this way, I'd like to see you lay out what some of the ideological assumptions are. Free market views are pretty well backed by economics, and plenty of nations have tried to implement alternative ideas and crashed pretty hard. > The last 40 years or more should have been enough time to see that humans are not just…

Markets have existed for thousands of years, no 'social structures' were built from the bottom up. It did not lead to any civilization then. On the contrary unchecked capitalism directly led to genocide, plunder, slavery, exploitation, segregation and worse. What we today understand as civilized society, democracy and rule of law took centuries of work by progressives and government. Decades of propaganda by libertar…

It seems like you're conflating government with social organization. Think about how a society could have social organizations like welfare, social security, medical treatment, mental health care, and all the other wonderful aspects of an organized society without combining that with the use of force to make people contribute to specific organizations or ways of living.

That's what Libertarianism is in my mind. It's not about reducing the scope of social organization, it's about divorcing that social organization from government and minimizing the responsibilities of government. When government gets large enough it A) ceases to act in the best interests of its citizens and B) starts to legitimize the use of force against its citizens. Take a look at how our police forces are militarizing and our elected representatives are ignoring us for a pretty concrete example.

The nice thing about small decentralized government is that even when it ceases to be of and for the people it can be taken down relatively quickly and painlessly.

The problem with the Libertarian approach is that it's genuinely hard to get people to agree with each other about whether a social endeavor is worth their time, and in the mean time real people are affected by whatever the societal ill is. That's something that we have to be willing to accept if we want to reduce the scope of government. We also have to be willing to accept that there are different ways of living that we might not agree with. And we have to be willing to help people who want to be in our society to join our society.

The real problem is that no matter what our society looks like, it's hard to get people to look past their knee-jerk reactions and try to be tolerant and understanding of others' ignorance. And that cuts both ways.

Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

#288

Post by ohyes »

cylinder wrote: post #276
hermitdev wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least you got paid for your overtime. Every salaried job I've had has been exempt from overtime. About 10 years ago, I spent a 6-month stretch pulling 100 hour weeks. Only went home every other day during the week, and that was mostly for a shower, an hour of sleep and a change of clothes. Other days, it was a shower on-site and a change of underwear & socks, no sleep. Got to go home on Friday nights, but back in…

And as soon as you complete that big project the employer can easily fire you. Why give up anything for free?

with cause because it was behind schedule!

Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

#289

Post by danharaj »

patrickg_zill wrote: post #267
danharaj wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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...

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

Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

#290

Post by supreme_sublime »

Can_Not wrote: post #283
briandear wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Central planning is the culprit. The free market works when it is allowed to work.

That's weird, I got the opposite conclusion. I would have thought this happened because China choose to drift back to free markets instead of improving their central planning. The government demanded a larger market for graduations, and the colleges were free to increase their prices. Is that not econ 101 supply and demand? Now the graduates are on the market and whoever wants to hire can pay at a lower market price,…

>I would have thought this happened because China choose to drift back to free markets instead of improving their central planning.

What would "improving their central planning" mean? Force people to study certain subjects? Force people to teach for free?

Throwing government money into a market definitely disrupts it. Perhaps it doesn't make it not "free" but it causes distortions that likely would not have come about from the market alone.

>Is that not econ 101 supply and demand?

Yes, it is. That means that these aren't simply forces that can be wished away by a central government with an agenda. They are things that come about naturally.

>Under a good central planning, anyone who really wants a job could be planned a state sponsered job.

"Good central planning" is an oxymoron if you ask me. In order to guarantee that people have jobs, you have to take away people's free will to make sure they can perform the functions you as a central planner desire. They cannot study what they want, you will essentially have to plan people's entire lives for them. This is all assuming that people are interchangeable cogs and you are able to predict that people will be good at the tasks you wish for them to perform.

>Interestingly enough, a lot of science and research in the US is state sponsered. If it weren't, I wonder if that talent would be employed

Who knows? The money used to fund their research would not have been taken and would have been spent how the person who paid the taxes saw fit. It is difficult to find exact numbers on research spending of government vs private industry. The top 20 companies spend almost $200 billion on R&D [0] this is about 1/5th of the US federal government total discretionary budget, which includes military spending. [1]

Point being, I think it is pretty safe to say that private R&D spending dwarfs public spending. The large corporations that are often maligned are the best institutions to do risky R&D as they have lots of resources and experience in their problem domain. Of course they don't always do so, but if they don't a competitor will.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/265645/ranking-of-the-20... [1] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...

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