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My Take | China’s tech workers need labour unions as major companies axe thousands of jobs
- For years, labour protection in Big Tech was seen as unnecessary, as firms offered generous pay and promising career paths
- Now many tech workers say they have been terminated on short notice with little room for severance pay negotiations
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Why you can trust SCMP
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Chinese tech companies are slashing jobs, but there seems to be little resistance from the affected workers, apart from sporadic complaints scattered around social media.
It is unlikely because these employees left happily. Many actually said they were notified of their dismissal on short notice, and were given take-it-or-leave-it severance packages with little to no room for negotiation.
Most companies have branded their job cuts as business restructures or optimisations, and few have been willing to disclose the number of departures and other specifics.
In an attempt to portray the terminations in a better light, some companies even congratulated dismissed employees on their “graduations”.
The silence of Chinese tech workers towards the sizeable lay-offs did not stem from gratitude, but rather the lack of collective bargaining power.
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