Fed up with long work hours, thousands of Chinese employees have joined an
online campaign called “Worker Lives Matter,” renewing a debate over mandatory overtime and revealing a sample of working hours at major Chinese companies. On Thursday, a grassroots
online database that asks Chinese employees to report their actual working hours went viral on GitHub, a Microsoft-owned platform that allows developers to share code and help each other build software. As of Friday, the survey has over 5,000 respondents, including employees from major tech companies like Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance.
Github was home to 2019’s “996.ICU” campaign, which challenged the
notoriousschedule that asks workers to be in the office “9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.”
“The campaign is initiated by Chinese programmers to address the current situation where overtime work is prevalent and unregulated in companies, including tech firms,” read a manifesto attached to the latest campaign, adding it was created by anonymous developers in China. “We workers need lives as well,” it states.
