Opinion | While China’s tech sector discusses 996 work culture, spare a thought for the masses of ‘dispatch workers’

Even as the Chinese government has moved to enact laws to regulate the employment of subcontracted workers, companies are looking for loopholes that allow them to get the most out of workers at the cheapest price

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Published: 9:00am, 30 Apr 2019Updated: 10:52am, 30 Apr 2019

By following China’s “996” work culture – working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week – employees will end up in hospital, warn the 996.ICU protesters, whose posts on software development platform Github have sparked widespread debate. The discussion on long working hours may have highlighted practices in the tech industry, but the fight for decent working hours has long been an uphill battle for China’s millions of so-called dispatch workers.

Dispatch workers, also known as agency workers, are those hired by labour agencies and then sent off to various workplaces on demand. Subcontracting, wherein the “user of the work” is separated from the “employer of the worker,” provides companies with a powerful shield against dispatch workers’ claims that they should receive the same wages and benefits as regular workers. Dispatch workers are often underpaid, even when they put in long hours and become de facto long-term workers.

Since the 1990s, both government-invested and private-run labour agencies have taken advantage of dispatch labour, absorbing the unemployed, rural migrants and fresh graduates. Working on a commission basis, labour agencies meet clients’ human resource needs, but neglect the day-to-day working conditions of the people they send out.

In 2008, a concern group of students from mainland universities, who worked undercover in Coca-Cola bottling plants in Hangzhou, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Dongguan and Huizhou, released a report on the labour conditions there, noting that the dispatch workers in the plants put in over 300 hours a month during peak season, working consecutive 12-hour shifts and accumulating overtime of more than 150 hours a month.

The Hangzhou plant, currently operated by Swire Coca-Cola Beverages Zhejiang Limited, employed 1,170 dispatch workers, or 43 per cent of its total employees, as of June 2008, according to the company spokesperson. However, the student investigation found that the proportion peaked at 90 per cent on some occasions. According to Chinese labour law, standard working hours should not exceed eight hours a day and 40 hours per week. Overtime should not exceed 36 hours a month. It appears that the Coca-Cola plants violated the letter and spirit of the law.