“In my experience young people, especially the post-90s generation, are reluctant to work overtime – they are more self-centered,” says labour rights expert Li Jupeng, one of many who have observed some millennials challenging the 996 concept.
self-centered is a funny word. It implies selfish, but is it really selfish if it's self-preservation?
Yet the executives and CEO who all benefit directly from unpaid overtime tool around in Maserati's and vacation on Greek islands, but surely that's not "self centered." Surely, capitalist culture has never, ever idolized self-centeredness and entitlement!
China has the same problems the West has. We see labor as this fungible thing done by faceless automatons and its the job of management to extract as much labor as possible to enrich those above them by any means possible. Its considered perfectly normal and moral to have a class of people worrying daily about their bills and keeping a roof in their head and a whole other class who we defend when they scream at the valet or the housekeeper because some trivial thing bothered them. We equate both those situations as the same thus barely being able to feed your kids is on the same level of outrage as 'you scuffed by Maserati's brake pedal with your boots!'
I don't envy the Chinese as they seem to have few fewer avenues to labor enrichment than the West, but fundamentally we all share the same problem: the one-sided relationship between capital and labor. Ironically, their country was built on addressing that fundamental problem but now have fallen into the same dirty form of capatalism everyone else has.
>Ironically, their country was built on addressing that fundamental problem but now have fallen into the same dirty form of capatalism everyone else has.
I laugh when people call it Communist.
Do workers own the means of production? No. Not Communist.
OVER-time. As in additional time over what was agreed in the original employee-employer relationship. There is nothing selfish here except maybe on the part of the companies that expect overtime out of their employees.
Even better, those who expect ot but have labelled an employee "key" to say they are ot-exempt...
I later found out it has a legal definition.
Key employee, in the ot law, means you have some profit sharing or stake in the company. Doesn't matter how "key" you are to the operations. FYI. I bet lots of people are getting shafted by this.
Exempt means you don't report hours. My first professional job after college was with one of the big consulting firms. I reported hours, and I got paid overtime after 40. I was expected to log at least 40 hours a week on something -- could be internal/self-training or client billable.
In all the other jobs I've had I did not report hours. I am hired to get a job done. If that sometimes takes me 30 hours a week and sometimes takes me 55 that is what I'm expected to do.
That's not how the law on this works. It wasn't changed until around 2015, which is why so many companies started doing funNgames with employee wages and hours around then in anticipation of the change.
Sounds like there's laws on this in many countries. In Norway you are exempt from overtime regulations if you have an independent position, which is pretty well defined in law and practice. It basically means that you control your own work day and what you work with. Typically C-level. It is of course abused by employers.
I know many people that are hourly that loves overtime. 1.5x-2x pay means a world of difference to them. Jobs for them ranges from drivers, construction, to programmers. Some are hoarding money for early retirement, just to make more, others are contract basis so earning 2-3x projected amount enables them to take half the year off.
This is to the point where many of these friends loathe to take an exempt job because they know their income will likely be cut in half on the initial transition without raises/promotions.
These professions also enjoy long periods of downtime. Which is really the important factor. Sure, it sucks working 12 hours days for long periods of time, but the weeks or months long periods of downtime between sessions make them tolerable.
I wouldn't mind two weeks of 5x12s followed by a full week off.
Floor nurses often work 3x12 shifts, so three 12-hours days with four days off per week. When my partner was a floor nurse, she would often try to schedule that magical 6x12 shift that provides eight days of vacation. Throw in three days of PTO the next week and you'd have yourself a 15-day vacation!
Whereas, if I want 15 consecutive days off, I'd need to spend 88 hours of PTO.
Yes. Heard of this too, wasn’t top of mind since I don’t have any nurses as friends.
To a lesser extent, there are some government jobs that gives options for 10hr work days so a person works 4 days per week. Shifting the day off for Monday and Friday and add in a few pto days per month, makes it possible to have nearly a week off work every month.
sure but it's slowly being eroded by the americanisation of companies & management styles.
salaried workers being exempt from paid overtime in most European countries has turned in to a joke.
Instead of just being used to deal with "emergency" situations, it's used to coerce extra work for free.
That's exactly it, overtime is so normalized that planning never takes an 8-hour workday into account, with the obvious result of a frequent need to go to overtime to achieve basic business goals.
I have to imagine something was lost in translation there? My brain just cannot fathom how "overtime" by the very nature of the word can be anything but an optional extra.
You'd just as likely selfishly choose overtime as you would not choose it.
I can't speak to the situation in the mainland, but in Hong Kong, "overtime" for employees in smaller local companies often means the period that you must work beyond your scheduled finish time, and for which you are not paid.
It is not optional if you plan on keeping your job
Self-preservation is the most selfish thing you can be centered on, and it is absolutely ethically and morally correct. Being self-centered is what makes free markets successful, as in pitting your self interests against others, brings out the most productive aspects of everyone involved.
This is wonderfully ideological. I'm surprised people still believe this stuff.
Free markets are successful because people are self-centred?
The last 40 years or more should have been enough time to see that humans are not just machine-like self-interested information processors that respond to the market, they do behave altruistically and will co-operate when the purpose is worth it.
It's this naive insistence that the market and holders of capital, if left alone, will direct humanity in the right direction that causes so much of the concentration of wealth, obscene inequality, economic instability and incredibly damaging waste that western economies have experienced since the end of the last world war.
Amusing to see the priests of this perverse religion still purveying this post-human fantasy of market democracy and Objectivism though.
> This is wonderfully ideological. I'm surprised people still believe this stuff.
Since I tend to skew this way, I'd like to see you lay out what some of the ideological assumptions are. Free market views are pretty well backed by economics, and plenty of nations have tried to implement alternative ideas and crashed pretty hard.
> The last 40 years or more should have been enough time to see that humans are not just machine-like self-interested information processors that respond to the market, they do behave altruistically and will co-operate when the purpose is worth it.
This is all true. The other side of that coin that frustrates the Progressive vision is that politicians and other government agents are not just altruistic beings who cooperate, according to public choice theory, they have a significant aspect of being self-interested information processors, to use your terms.
> It's this naive insistence that the market and holders of capital, if left alone, will direct humanity in the right direction...
I'm not sure who is insisting that. I think you have an underlying assumption that the state must provide for the totality of its citizens existence, so you assume that if the government isn't doing this, people must believe that corporations would take over that role.
Free market and small government advocates reject that entirely and believe that social structures can be built from the bottom up. Individualists don't think there needs to be a larger direction for humanity because your individual endeavors have intrinsic value.
Markets have existed for thousands of years, no 'social structures' were built from the bottom up. It did not lead to any civilization then. On the contrary unchecked capitalism directly led to genocide, plunder, slavery, exploitation, segregation and worse.
What we today understand as civilized society, democracy and rule of law took centuries of work by progressives and government.
Decades of propaganda by libertarians has set up an artificial divide between government and people. See 'Democracy in Chains' by Nancy Maclean.
The government is you in a democracy, it's there to protect your and everyone else's interests, that what democracy and rule of law means. It's what guarantees a somewhat civilized society. It is not this simplistic 'majority can do what they want' illiteracy spread by market fundamentalists.
It appears some people become rich and increasingly alienated from people, society and government and begin to believe they don't need government. This is the kind of hubris that leads to tyranny and quasi feudalism, which is of course what they want.
It seems like you're conflating government with social organization. Think about how a society could have social organizations like welfare, social security, medical treatment, mental health care, and all the other wonderful aspects of an organized society without combining that with the use of force to make people contribute to specific organizations or ways of living.
That's what Libertarianism is in my mind. It's not about reducing the scope of social organization, it's about divorcing that social organization from government and minimizing the responsibilities of government. When government gets large enough it A) ceases to act in the best interests of its citizens and B) starts to legitimize the use of force against its citizens. Take a look at how our police forces are militarizing and our elected representatives are ignoring us for a pretty concrete example.
The nice thing about small decentralized government is that even when it ceases to be of and for the people it can be taken down relatively quickly and painlessly.
The problem with the Libertarian approach is that it's genuinely hard to get people to agree with each other about whether a social endeavor is worth their time, and in the mean time real people are affected by whatever the societal ill is. That's something that we have to be willing to accept if we want to reduce the scope of government. We also have to be willing to accept that there are different ways of living that we might not agree with. And we have to be willing to help people who want to be in our society to join our society.
The real problem is that no matter what our society looks like, it's hard to get people to look past their knee-jerk reactions and try to be tolerant and understanding of others' ignorance. And that cuts both ways.
Of course people will cooperate: it's in their self-interest. It's rational to recognize positive-sum situations and cooperate.
It's also rational and serves your self-interest to act "altruistically", as your empathy is a basic biological instinct that you can't really fight against, just like hunger or sexual desire. But just like with hunger or sexual desire, letting a biological instinct dominate your whole life is unhealthy and, tbh, pretty stupid.
But you have neighbors downstream who will object to your contaminants polluting their use of the water. Externalities can be efficiently resolved by applying the Coase theorem.[1] Another common objection is that there are certain public services that can only be provided by the state, but we often find in practice that self-interested parties can develop a business model that addresses those needs.[2]
> In this 1960 paper, Coase argued that real-world transaction costs are rarely low enough to allow for efficient bargaining and hence the theorem is almost always inapplicable to economic reality. Since then, others have demonstrated the importance of the perfect information assumption and shown using game theory that inefficient outcomes are to be expected when this assumption is not met.
Not so reassuring.
Let's think about a plausible scenario: I run an industrial facility and am secretly dumping industrial waste into the river. My neighbors start getting sick. When they analyze their drinking water, it shows the presence of a bunch of chemicals whose most probable source is my industrial facility. My neighbors realize I'm to blame, and complain to me about dumping chemicals into the water. I say I've got no idea what they're about and those chemicals must be from somewhere else. Obviously I refuse to hand over any records from my facility.
Getting nowhere, my neighbors file a lawsuit. Then we go through a years-long series of lawsuits where I deny any wrongdoing and maybe eventually have to pay some money, although it hardly brings back everyone killed by illnesses my facility caused.
There is such a thing as enlightened self-interest, where you consider not just what's good for yourself in the here-and-now but also whether the likely consequences to you (both natural and social) are going to be good.
Dumping waste in the river may be cheaper now, but won't be if you get hit by a fine, or have to deal with an angry mob at the factory gates, or end up polluting your own drinking water supply.
The problem is you end up having to do a bunch of hedging like this. What if I have a lifetime supply of safe drinking water for my home and I am absolutely positive nobody will find out I'm dumping waste into the water? Or I'm sure I can blame it on someone else? If self-interest is all that matters this is a completely logical course of action (and I hardly need to point out that this isn't just some theoretical thing; numerous people have done just this).
...which is why people spend a significant amount of time dreaming up both incentives and enforcement mechanisms to ensure that it's not in one's self-interest to be really shitty to your neighbors.
It's not a perfect system - in particular, it's reactionary, which means that enough people a.) need to be harmed and b.) need to complain effectively before the broken incentives are fixed. In practice, it seems to work a lot better than societies where people act for the nebulous "common good", which always seems to end up being defined in a way that suits the self-interests of the people doing the defining anyway.
You have a selfish interest in maintaining your society. This includes things like ensuring the less fortunate in your community are fed, clothed, and sheltered, and that you don't destroy the environment in which you live.
But, as we often see, people act against their self-interest all the time.
self-centered is a funny word. It implies selfish, but is it really selfish if it's self-preservation?