Compared with developed countries such as Europe and America, the phenomenon of overtime work in China is indeed quite serious. In fact, it's not just the Internet industry and the real estate industry that have been working overtime. Let's look at restaurants, supermarkets, retail, entertainment, private medical education and so on all over the country except state-owned enterprises. 996 which line is not rolled up?
Working overtime is a common occurrence for China people. Even for some people with high sense of responsibility and initiative, they feel sorry for the training of the company and the boss if they don't work overtime. There is no upper limit for personal working hours, and it is very comfortable to work overtime every day without a raise.
What is the reason? Why do we form such a workplace culture? Why is overtime common and serious?
The formation of overtime culture has its historical background
It is not that countries such as Europe and the United States do not work overtime, but that the industrialization process in different countries is different. Are there still few sweatshops in Europe and America? Think about the history of child labor in those countries, think about the slave policy in the United States, think about the loud slogan of "money never sleeps" on Wall Street, and think about Marx's sentence: "Capitalism comes into this world, and blood and dirty things are dripping from every pore from head to toe."
In order to accumulate more primitive capital, capitalism not only squeezes the labor force, but also plunders the resources of the colonies, taking away their nearly free labor force and raw materials, producing and processing them into industrial products, and then dumping them back, making a lot of money. In the historical stage when European and American capitals accumulated wealth through plunder, China was still a colonized, plundered and dumped country.
The whole world was divided up by the great powers in the form of colonies. Because of the uneven distribution of spoils and repeated economic crises caused by overcapacity, two world wars broke out one after another. Countries fired at each other to plunder colonies, digested domestic excess capacity through military industrial chains, and plundered other countries' resources such as science and technology, talents and wealth. Some people have been wiped out, the world resources have been redistributed, and they have won more, lost their military, political and economic dominance, and started again bit by bit by relying on the original industrial base. Germany and Japan are such typical examples.
Then developed countries began to harvest wool through the advantages of industrial first-Mover advantage, capital accumulation and technical barriers. And transfer some low-end, polluting and labor-intensive industrial chains to these defeated countries or poor countries. People have left some high value-added industries that can be won while lying down. For example, the United States traded a plane for 100 million really cool shirts in China. To put it bluntly, this situation means that people have exchanged the labor value of 1 working hours for the labor value of you 10000 working hours. This is the difference between high value-added industries and low value-added industries. In the underdeveloped countries, the labor force is worthless.
Looking back at the time when modern China society was just knocked out of the country, western industrial powers came to China to invest and set up factories, and took a fancy to the huge population and cheap land here. The population at that time had enough strength, but lacked confidence. You're welcome to say that those workers can let you exploit the surplus value at will as long as they are satisfied. After the defeat of the Qing dynasty, the land can be sold to you for almost free to open a factory. Later, New China was founded. At the time of reform and opening up, China's advantages were population and land resources. Pay in advance. In the minds of these buyers, overtime can lead to promotion, and promotion can lead to salary increase. The salary increase means that the unit labor time becomes valuable, and the prepaid labor time can be paid in advance.
According to Cao, there are only 200 million people in China who really have purchasing power, that is, only these 200 million people have "money and spending power", and the remaining 654.38+200 million people are concentrated in the low-end industrial chain, that is, they have no money and no time, and basically do not consume except the necessities of life.
However, a large part of these 200 million people are disposable income earned during working hours, but they have "money" but "no time". On the whole, only a few people have money and time, but they don't like domestic "socks" and go abroad to sweep goods. What they like is imported goods.