Work culture ‘996’: China’s Supreme People’s Court has excessive overtime

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“Recently, overtime work in some industries has received a lot of attention,” the People’s Supreme Court wrote in its statement, which it issued to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security. Workers deserve rights to “rest and vacation,” adding that “adhering to the national system of working hours is the legal obligation of employers,” the court wrote.

He cited several examples of companies from various industries that he said violated labor standards, including an unnamed courier company that told employees to work 996 hours. Telling employees to work so hard “has seriously violated the law on extending the upper working day limit and should be considered invalid,” the court said.

The public reaction against the culture of overwork is not new. Alibaba (BABA) Co-founder Jack Ma, for example, was harshly criticized in China two years ago after calling the 996 culture a “huge blessing.” And Chinese labor law already prohibits employees from working that long.

But the country’s latest Supreme Court edict comes as Beijing faces massive crackdown on private business in China, implementing new regulations and fines to reduce the influence of powerful corporations. President Xi Jinping and other senior officials have justified the crackdown as necessary to address data security risks and inequality in education and to prevent social instability.

“There’s nothing wrong with advocating hard work, but it can’t be a shield for employers to avoid [their] legal responsibilities, ”the court wrote Thursday.

The 996 culture debate has been revived this year during the repression of private enterprise. In January, e-commerce company Pinduoduo (PDD) he faced an intense backlash over allegations that he overworked his employees, after two of his employees died unexpectedly, including a man who died by suicide.

The company did not respond at the time to questions about allegations made against its work culture, but said it had set up a team to provide psychological counseling after a worker’s suicide.

Recently, young people in China have also begun to reject an intense work culture by invoking the desire to “run out of hands” or “tang ping”. The philosophy calls for people to reject social pressures to work hard, get married, have children, or buy property because of the diminished benefits of achieving those goals.

– Laura He and Sophie Jeong contributed to this report.

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