Four Post-95s College Students Produce Document of Chinese Companies’ Working Schedules

A document named “WorkerLivesMatter” that has covers specific departments in over 1300 Chinese companies has been viewed over 100,000 times by October 12th.

The online document was produced by a group of graduates with academic qualifications ranging from undergraduate to master’s degree who have worked as interns in technical posts of major Chinese Internet companies. The individuals range in age from 1996 to 2001 and all have received offers from several major companies. In order to figure out the transparency of Internet enterprises, they decided to create a table to share information they found in their search for work.

This table includes not only Internet companies, but also firms in traditional industries such as finance, consulting, real estate, and even energy and construction. The contents of the document includes items such as company name, department, job posting, base salary, working hours and off-duty hours, as well as optional items such as lunch and dinner times.

For Internet companies, there are a total of 186 pieces of data from Tencent employees, followed by Alibaba and ByteDance. Employees from Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, Meituan, Baidu, Kuaishou and Xiaomi basically work from 10:00 am to 9:00 pm every working day. At JD.COM and Huawei, the working hours are from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm. The working hours of Bilibili, which ran from 10:00 am to 7:00 pm, won accolades from netizens.

There are still a few imperfections in the table, such as the inability to verify its authenticity and some of the contradictory elements. Some are even saying that their companies will make trouble for the people who published the document. At the same time, the initiators said they may imitate the WeChat official account offershow, which is used to check the salary of company’s post, or limit the number of submissions by each person and add a voting mechanism to improve the reliability of the form.

The overtime culture in China’s top tech firms has made headlines in recent years. In August, top Chinese governing bodies released a collective memo, saying that the “996” work culture – a 12-hour, six-day working schedule – represents a serious violation of the law pertaining to maximum work hours.

SEE ALSO: Top Chinese Governing Bodies Call ‘996’ Work Culture Illegal