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Source/Snow Leopard Finance and Economics (ID: xuebaocaijingshe)
Four days of work, three days of rest, and the same salary.
In early June, a total of about 3,300 employees in 70 companies in more than 30 industries in the UK began an “anti-involution” experiment. This is the largest short work week pilot event ever, and everyone from company managers to ordinary wage workers is watching the end result.
In China, the overtime culture still prevails in the big Internet companies, and news of “sudden death during overtime” occurs from time to time. Although since last year, many companies have declared that they are no longer “996” or “big and small weeks”, the trend of overtime work has not really eased.
When will the wind of “anti-involution” blow up in China?
Behind the eight-hour workday
The 4-day work system, also known as the 100:80:100 model, requires employees to achieve 100% work results in 80% of their time if they want to get 100% of their wages. Master working mode.
This change runs through the development of capitalism.
Britain is the birthplace of modern capitalism, and the big factories that we are accustomed to today were also born in Britain with the first industrial revolution and changed the form of labor organization in the world.
Marx said that capitalism has brought unprecedented progress in productivity, and the price behind the progress is the hard work and blood and tears of the workers. With the birth of the factory, is the super long hours of work and labor. At that time, British factories were labor-intensive, with low wages and extremely poor working conditions. Workers generally worked 10 to 16 hours a day, usually 6 days a week.
At that time, capitalists tended to extend the working hours of workers to obtain more surplus value. After all, under the condition of constant labor efficiency, the length of working hours is directly related to the results of work. This ethos has also spread throughout the Western world. According to statistics, in 1890 full-time employees in American manufacturing plants worked an average of 100 hours a week.
The improvement comes from the continuous strikes and protests by workers, as well as from changes in the way factories are managed and produced.
In 1914, Ford announced that the working day would be reduced from nine to eight hours, and that the daily wage would be raised from $2.34 to $5. The corporate world waited for Ford’s bankruptcy, but the latter made a net profit of as much as $30 million in 1914. Moreover, from 1908 to 1916, the price of the Model T fell from $850 to $360, but its net profit margin was still as high as 300%.
Behind this is the application of Ford’s large-scale assembly line production, which almost perfectly reflects Frederick Taylor’s management philosophy, that is, splitting the entire production process and finding the most economical and most efficient “standard operation” method”, distributed to each person. Taylor emphasizes that working hours research and job analysis are definitely not about making workers work hard, but about finding a standard quota for a worker to work “normally”.
The eight-hour working system was subsequently established, and the era entered the era of capital creating value. Hard work is no longer the best way to accumulate wealth and promote production, technological innovation has become the main force for improving production efficiency, and capital accumulation has begun to become the source of value creation.
British confidence
Similar to the industrial revolution more than a hundred years ago, the information revolution has once again changed the productive forces and production relations, and globalization has brought about a new industrial division of labor. Developed countries are more engaged in high-end manufacturing, finance, technology and creative industries, while developing countries focus on general manufacturing and primary raw material processing.
In the new value chain, the UK is undoubtedly in an upstream position, showing a very prominent feature of innovation and value creation. To promote “innovation,” the Taylor system of seeing people as machine parts no longer applies.
Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, is the most famous critic of the Taylor system. He believes that knowledge workers have a strong desire to realize self-worth, attach great importance to achievement incentives and spiritual incentives, and they are more inclined to have loose and An autonomous working environment, unwilling to be restrained like a worker on an assembly line. The management of knowledge-based talents should focus on stimulating vision and potential.
Silicon Valley, known for its loose management, also had a crazy overtime culture. At that time, workaholics were not only advertised as an ideal way of life, but also an industrial chain based on selling successful studies appeared in Silicon Valley.
But then Silicon Valley took a different approach to motivating employees. Walking into Google, you can even see employees wearing masks and slippers, free lunches, shuttle buses, gyms, game rooms… Employees enjoy star-level benefits and are happy to work overtime. Using benefits to encourage overtime is also a corporate charm.
Silicon Valley is not the “silly big money” of landlords. No company is willing to support idlers. The purpose of their “indulgent” employees is to manage employees with an inclusive culture, so as to stimulate employees’ creativity and improve the overall work efficiency of the company.
The growing role of innovation makes it possible to foster an environment for innovation – a more relaxed working atmosphere and more flexible, shorter working hours – which is why the UK has become a large-scale “four-day work day” It is related to the high-end value chain of the global industrial chain division of labor in the British economic structure with outstanding innovative and creative capabilities.
The 4-day work system experiment in the UK is also the general trend in the post-epidemic era. After three years of the baptism of the epidemic, the physical and mental health of employees is being valued by more and more companies. Therefore, many European and American companies want to take this opportunity to implement new ways of working and improve employee benefits. Many workers in the UK strongly support this, arguing that the four-day workweek improves physical health, spends more time with family members and increases happiness.
Before the United Kingdom, other countries have already started similar practices. Iceland’s 4-day work experiment between 2015 and 2019 was rated as a “great success” by research institutions. Workers in the trial reported less stress at work, a lower risk of burnout, and improved health and work-life balance. Many companies in Iceland are now implementing a 4-day workweek.
When did the big Chinese manufacturers abandon the 996?
In 2019, Chinese programmers launched the 996.I CU campaign on Github, the world’s largest open source website, to protest the excessive overtime culture of Internet companies. The promoter wrote in English on the campaign page: “Developers’ lives matter” (Programmers’ lives matter). life is also life).
The past 20 years have been a glorious history of the rapid development of China’s Internet with dividends. One billion new users poured into the Internet, forming the world’s largest and most dynamic digital society, and bringing the world’s largest Internet market. However, the golden development period of China’s Internet does not rely on the core technology and product innovation dominated by European and American countries, but a strategy dominated by sales or market.
In the past 20 years, Internet giants have been focusing on sieging cities and snatching resources. After a product is launched, whoever can grab the market at the fastest speed will win. At that time, BAT, doing whatever it takes to make money, and fighting for manpower, has also become one of the magic weapons to grab the market and gain profits.
996 came into being under this opportunity. It once helped the big manufacturers to gain a higher market share faster, and also achieved the leap-forward development of the Internet dividend period, and many famous enterprises made a lot of money.
However, in this wave of wealth distribution, workers are at the low point of distribution. When the gap in the door to wealth freedom is getting narrower and narrower, more and more people are questioning whether working hard and overtime is really worth it, and how much water can be squeezed out of 996. Pretending to be busy and valuable has turned into a dark school in the workplace.
The disadvantages of extensive growth are becoming more and more obvious. Over the years, big factories have worked hard to 996, in order to compete for the cake of the demographic dividend. But the “resource curse” has always existed: abundant resources may be a curse rather than a blessing for economic development. If a country relies too much on a relatively abundant resource, it will lead to slow growth or even stagnation in the later period.
It is true that BAT has achieved immediate results many times by relying on 996 and manpower. Recruit a team of people, invest in a new project, and you can make crazy money in the market. “Investment without borders” has become the slogan of the big manufacturers. However, in recent years, there have been more and more projects that big factories have spent a lot of money but failed to return. After the tide of diversification recedes, there are very few competitive products left.
With the return of capital to rationality, spending money like dirt has become a thing of the past. The focus of the capital market’s investigation of big factories has also changed. From users to profits, big factories are forced to think of ways to make money. At this time, it is not reliable to rely on manpower alone, and the overtime culture cannot continue to bring high profits. Many companies have begun to reflect on whether 996 is effective. Tying employees to their workstations to work overtime every day may not bring about an increase in efficiency, but in exchange for public opinion attacks and damage to their reputations, the gains outweigh the gains.
Juliet Shore, an economist and sociologist at Boston College, said of the four-day workday: “It doesn’t make sense today to stick to a rigid, time-based system.” Whether considering labor relations and social image, or In order to drive the next transformation, major manufacturers must abandon the 996, because it has become an obstacle to the future.
Although the domestic 996 style has not yet exited, there is still a long way to go to completely reverse the overtime culture, but it is the general trend to continuously optimize the management model and change the bad management habits. The good news is that some departments of Tencent have piloted a forced 6 o’clock get off work day one day a week, and Byte and Kuaishou have also canceled the big and small weeks. It is a wise move for Chinese Internet companies to be willing to collectively reflect and implement concrete actions.
Industrial transformation and changes in management concepts complement each other. Both the former assembly line factories and today’s Silicon Valley giants have experienced such changes. History will not repeat, but it will always rhyme. Chinese companies facing major transformation also need to consider how to use new management methods to create more incremental value.
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