China’s Workers on Overtime

[Randy W]

from the Sixth Tone

Why Can’t China’s Workers Unite on Overtime?

The country’s white-collar workers are protesting their companies’ exhausting schedules. What about their blue-collar counterparts?

Quote

 

That is to say, Zhuang found white-collar workers more likely than blue-collar workers to identify their weekly hours as working “overtime,” when their recent schedules objectively did not exceed 40 hours. Meanwhile, blue-collar workers are more likely to underestimate the extent they have worked overtime. This universal tendency to misstate working hours, albeit in opposite directions, calls into question traditional assumptions that white-collar professionals complain more because they are better educated or better understand China’s labor laws.

 . . .

Because, crucially, many blue-collar workers do not consider working overtime to be an evil. If anything, in my fieldwork I have found many blue-collar workers favor jobs that provide them with more chances to work overtime. Reliant on overtime pay, wrapping up at 6 p.m. is a luxury they cannot afford.

In many recruitment advertisements targeting blue-collar workers, overtime work is not just implied but highlighted, even guaranteed. A telling Foxconn advertisement from last year assures applicants, “The first three months of base salary for Foxconn’s Zhengzhou campus is 1,900 yuan ($290) per month; the comprehensive salary is 2,800-3,500 yuan (overtime included) … Overtime will be no less than 60 hours per month.”

There are several crucial pieces of information to be obtained from this advertisement. First of all, the base salary for the first three months in this advertisement is exactly the minimum wage of the province where the factory is located. This is typical for blue-collar jobs. Although many workers actually earn much more than the minimum wage, their additional pay comes from working overtime rather than higher hourly rates. In this case, if a formal employee works the maximum schedule allowed on paper, their salary will increase almost 100%, from 2,100 yuan to almost 4,000 yuan a month.

Second, the selling point of this advertisement is that monthly overtime will not be less than 60 hours. As the base salary is so low, working overtime is a selling point instead of a warning sign. Some factories are not popular among workers because they don’t have enough orders to provide workers with overtime, and some factory workers who enjoy relatively relaxed schedules characterize themselves as “lazy” and going to seed in an easy factory.

 

 

[Martin B]

The last job my wife had in Guangzhou prior to us moving to the US was an office job, Monday-Saturday 8am-6pm, but each day had a 2-hour break, so 48 hour total. Probably half of those were spent chatting with me on WeChat 🤣, another 25% socializing with co-workers, and the last 25% actually working.

My sister in law years ago worked at a milk tea place, and 50-60 hours/week was the norm (for a whopping 2500rmb/month). She would come back exhausted after a busy day...

Edited February 7, 2021 by Barfus (see edit history)