996 working hour system
It is estimated that more than three-quarters of urban workers in big cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou suffer from work-related fatigue, musculoskeletal pain, sleep[18] or eating disorders, occupational stress, and work–family imbalance.
[7] In September 2016, the classified advertising website 58.com officially declared its adoption of the 996 working hour system,[25] attracting criticism from employees and social commentators.
[29] Nevertheless, on 23 February 2022, the sudden death was reported of a 28-year-old employee at ByteDance, after he posted a message on Maimai [zh], a career and social networking platform, the night before.
ByteDance later issued a statement that was shared in an internal letter with its staff in China, according to which the employee felt dizzy after an hour of exercise at the company gym, before he was taken to the hospital.
[30] After 58.com's 996 schedule was made known to the public, an internal email from the vice-president Gang He (Chinese: 何剛) of JD.com was leaked online, which contained a demand for the management team of JD.com to implement the 996 working hour system "on a flexible basis".
In early January 2021, the e-commerce platform Pinduoduo was accused of forcing its employees to do extremely intensive overtimes, which supposedly led to the karoshi death of a 22-year-old worker.
[34][35] Later, the official account of Pinduoduo posted (but deleted shortly afterwards) an answer on Zhihu, saying "Those who are at the bottom of the society earn their wages at the risk of losing their lives".
The repository on GitHub states that the name "996.icu" refers to how developers who work under the 996 system (9 a.m. - 9 p.m., six days per week) would risk poor health and a possible stay in an intensive care unit.
The flurry of activity led to the "issue" page of the repository to be flooded with spam and shut down, which was hotly discussed on Zhihu, Sina Weibo, and WeChat.
[58][59][60][61][62][63] Jack Ma stated that workers should consider 996 "a huge blessing" as there is no way to "achieve the success [one] want[s] without paying extra effort and time",[64][65][66][67][68][27][69] while Richard Liu, founder of JD.com, said that "Slackers are not my brothers!
[71] The People's Daily wrote that "advocating 'hard work' does not mean resorting to and enforcing the 996 system",[72][73][74] while an editorial in the China News Service said that it is "unnecessary to exchange life for money".
