Alibaba founder Jack Ma says companies forcing staff to work overtime are ‘foolish’
- Billionaire makes remarks in social media post after earlier comments that long hours could be a ‘huge blessing’ for young workers
- He also calls enforced 996 schedule – working 9am to 9pm, six days a week – ‘inhumane’ and ‘unsustainable’
Alibaba Group founder and billionaire Jack Ma again weighed in on the Chinese tech industry’s gruelling overtime work culture on Sunday, this time calling enforced long hours “unsustainable”.
He was responding to a debate that has emerged in recent weeks among Chinese tech workers over the 996 schedule, which means working 9am to 9pm, six days a week. Industry workers set up a discussion group called “996.ICU” on the code-sharing platform GitHub, suggesting that anyone working those hours all the time could end up in a hospital intensive care unit with burnout.
“If you find a job you like, the 996 problem does not exist; if you’re not passionate about it, every minute of going to work is a torment,” Ma said in a post on his Weibo account on Sunday.
“No one likes working at a company that forces you to do ‘996’. Not only is it inhumane, it’s unhealthy and even more unsustainable for long periods – plus workers, relatives and the law do not approve of it,” he said. “In the long term, even if you pay a higher salary, employees will all leave.”
Ma added that companies that thought they could profit by forcing staff to work overtime were “foolish” and doomed to fail.