are you telling me all those lemmy.ml users were lying when they told me that China is the best? that China is better than the US? that China is a great place to work and live?
Hey! I can chime in here! I studied Chinese and business like 10 years ago (so my knowledge might be a bit outdated) so I can provide a bit of context.
A lot of workers from rural China has limited work opportunities or would earn very little. So what they do is they’d migrate to bigger cities where they’d be able to work at factories (like the one in this pic) at a higher wage and more hours. Then they send their wage home. Some things that surprised me was that in many cases the workers themselves would request long hours, to earn more, and that they’d likely only go home for the big holidays like lunar New year
It’s understandable from a person-by-person scale but that doesn’t make it acceptable.
Often, a group of individual workers each acting in their own personal financial interest can disadvantage workers as a whole. One person working themselves to exhaustion to provide for their family can raise expectations for all workers to do the same. That’s why collective bargaining is so important for labour rights.
For a while I was hiring people in a nearby country, and despite advertising it as daytime office hours only, the majority of applicants would ask if they could work nights instead because they already had a job during the day that wouldn’t give them overtime.
hey now.
are you telling me all those lemmy.ml users were lying when they told me that China is the best? that China is better than the US? that China is a great place to work and live?
Hey! I can chime in here! I studied Chinese and business like 10 years ago (so my knowledge might be a bit outdated) so I can provide a bit of context.
A lot of workers from rural China has limited work opportunities or would earn very little. So what they do is they’d migrate to bigger cities where they’d be able to work at factories (like the one in this pic) at a higher wage and more hours. Then they send their wage home. Some things that surprised me was that in many cases the workers themselves would request long hours, to earn more, and that they’d likely only go home for the big holidays like lunar New year
It’s understandable from a person-by-person scale but that doesn’t make it acceptable.
Often, a group of individual workers each acting in their own personal financial interest can disadvantage workers as a whole. One person working themselves to exhaustion to provide for their family can raise expectations for all workers to do the same. That’s why collective bargaining is so important for labour rights.
For a while I was hiring people in a nearby country, and despite advertising it as daytime office hours only, the majority of applicants would ask if they could work nights instead because they already had a job during the day that wouldn’t give them overtime.