i'm curious to get some concrete data wrt to worker rights/labour legislation in prc: is it as bad as it's often perceived in the west? has anything changed recently? there's a weird duality to it in my perception, on one side it's a relatively happy nation, but on the other side there is the crazy 996 work schedule, poor safety net that's largely substituted by investment in housing etc 🤔
Having worked a little bit in an office in China, I can tell you that it is extremely hard to fire people there. There are some government mandated minimums for employment that have to be met and as such many companies employ people they don’t actually need. If you go into a local KFC, you’ll notice half a dozen people standing around waiting to move food off tables into the trash since the government requires KFC to employ minimum amount of people. I saw many examples of outright incompetent and laziness in the workplace and management basically shrugged and said there is nothing they can do about it.
Sure! Workers right's in the PRC are stronger than nearly anywhere else in the world. Wages are up 4x in the last 3 decades, homeownership is nearly universal, urban poverty is essentially eradicated, workers right and safety are enshrined in its constitutional documents, unions are strong and regularly get the backing of the government against employer abuses. Mandatory unions and CPC reps in every business above a certain employee number threshold.
The 996 work schedules prevalent in some industries like tech remain a problem to be tackled, but since work hours have been decreasing steadily over the last few years, I think we can be confident that this will be addressed at higher levels.
Right? If he tells me what happened on April 15, 1989 then I might look more into the claims. Otherwise I’ll assume it’s all junk and continue to the next comment.
I think some of it might just be a base reaction of “ooh china bad no way it could be good at all I’m gonna downvote this and leave”, especially considering I found this post from sorting by hot on ‘all’. I dont doubt there is some exaggeration of how bad china is, but I agree that there is no way it’s as good as the one commenter is saying, however I have no sources or points either.
I really hope you’re right. But this doesn’t seem to settle with the Foxxconn suicides that happened due to low wage and brutal working conditions.
I’m not sure that wage increases is comparable to western countries, in the last 3 decades china has become very rich from being very poor. It is only reasonable that wages will go up. And for numbers: China’s gdp rose 1600% in the last 3 decades, it would seem that 400% wage increase keeps most money in the hands of the employers and not in the hands of workers. And in absolute terms, Chinese labor is much much cheaper than any other western country (that’s why China manufactures most of the world’s goods), meaning Chinese workers get much less money for their efforts.
China has a huge housing crisis (just like most other developed countries). The state had built huge ghost cities that nobody wants to live in, people bought unfinished houses and are now refusing to pay their mortgage. Just google china housing crisis and look at the problems it has to face.
The dude is also quoting a CGTN documentary about poverty in China. Just using one state run media source as a reference here just crushes any of his credibility.
He needs a healthy dose of anti-propaganda from serpentza or advchina on YouTube.
Some of this is real. Some of this is aspirational. Some of this is straight-up propaganda (and not even very credible propaganda!).
Life in China is nowhere near as dire as most westerners feel seemingly compelled to insist it “really” is. Life in China is nowhere near as paradisiacal as its strongest proponents feel compelled to state it is. The truth, as is usual, lies somewhere between the extremes and, further, in a nation as large and ornate as China, varies strongly according to where you are.
Many (not all) of the horrific stories you hear (like the Foxconn thing: I work about a 25 minute walk from that campus) are true-ish but usually overstated and are not representative of most experienced life here. (One area, however, where China is very similar to the west is that tech companies are utter dumpster fires as employers.) Conversely many of the rosy pictures you find painted in the above links are also overstated, incompletely analyzed, and again not representative of the lived lives of most people here.
For an example of the latter, I’ll pick on the “own their own home” thing. Yes, it’s true, 70% of Chinese millennials own their own home. Because their parents (and sometimes their grandparents!) took massive hits to their lifestyles to scrape the money together … for a down payment. (A frequent pattern is Chinese seniors taking up a mortgage on a home they’ve owned for decades just so they can meet a down payment for their children or grandchildren.) In the bigger cities people refer to themselves as “house slaves” because the majority of their income goes to service their mortgages, community fees, and other expenses related solely to owning a home. They own their own home, but very little else as a result. What’s going on with housing here right now cannot continue for much longer before there’s a collapse, and there’s some signs of that collapse already beginning as young people put off getting married later and later and later in life (because it’s almost obligatory for the man to own a home before marriage). There will come a time where people will stop bothering to even get married, to have children, because of something as simple as “I can’t afford a house in my lifetime”. The older generations can only mortgage off so much before the well runs dry.
(Source for my opinions: 22 years and counting of living and working in China, observing both my own state and that of my extended family here.)
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