How is this not legal slavery?
Young Chinese are sick of working long hours
261–270 of 298 posts
Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours
#262Poor 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 $…
Every country has positives and negatives, you just listed the negatives. Have you ever been to China recently? The major cities there are 10 years ahead of the West. No one uses cash anymore in China. You use your mobile phone to pay for everything... even the street food vendor or mom and pop stores accept Alipay or WeChat Pay. Public transportation is clean and efficient; new stops (for subway) and new routes (hig…
Oh please. big tall building is not innovation nor sign of progress.
Mobile phone payment? my credit card wipe takes 5 seconds. I don't need grandma to try to get my QR code for 30 seconds. AND it works most countries....except China. Foreigners can't even pay properly in China.
Every country (except US) has great public transportation. Asian countries. European countries. It's not exclusive to China (unless you count kids peeing in the train)
Cities are super safe and clean...where the tourists are. Why don't you try to go where normal people actually live.
Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours
#263Earlier 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.
The free market is what allows this to happen in the first place. The free market's goal is to abuse workers and push them to just near their breaking point for profits.
Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
No it isn't actually true. Roughly 80% of Chinese people are happy with the direction the country is going vs 40% in the USA. Most people don't care about censorship and the ones that do can get around it. From their point of view, it is no different to the NSA or the cameras in the UK (way more than China). Most Chinese people I know own a house (more like a shack) BUT it is out in the countryside. They want to move…
> No it isn't actually true. Roughly 80% of Chinese people are happy with the direction the country is going vs 40% in the USA. This doesn't really have much do with superior governance though, does it? It has a lot do with the country's recent history. a) It help government approval tremendously when you can censor bad news and disproportionately cover positive news. b) It's also really difficult to assess how much…
I'm still on the fence if it is superior governance (corruption is common). Although the same could be said of the USA's economy. Most of the growth in the USA is just random luck from the end of world war 2 and then riding the wave of growth without screwing it up (much).
The point I was trying to make is don't expect a revolution any time soon. They are fairly happy since life is generally improving for "most" Chinese people.
Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I believe you shouldn't "work" more than 20-24 hours a week period, especially if you have your own projects or other systemic pursuits.
I wish I could work 20-24 hours/week. I'd be so much more productive. I'm at 65 now if I calculate in my unpaid commute. It's a total drain on life.
I see China's system making it's way to USA soon, in my opinion they just lay the blueprints.
Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours
#266“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?
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…
>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.
Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least in America, isn't it a product of FDR?
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...
Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours
#268I 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 to…
I worked in China for 5 years. Our suppliers would sometimes work their software engineers so hard, that their wives would come in crying in the office at night because they never saw their husbands.
I was there to witness it because I also worked the same hours. I am a stupid man, who believes in people who build hot dog apps apparently.
Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Self-preservation is the most selfish thing you can be centered on, and it is absolutely ethically and morally correct. Being self-centered is what makes free markets successful, as in pitting your self interests against others, brings out the most productive aspects of everyone involved.
Except by that standard, me pouring waste in the river, instead of paying to have it properly disposed is "ethically and morally correct."
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Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours
#270NASA 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... 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 wha…
Have a link to anything supporting the NASA comment? I believe you, I'm just curious to read an article on it.