Liu Yuanju: When different economies compete in the short term, the advantages of low human rights can indeed play a role, which is a low mode of competition.

Chinese programmers collectively opposed the 996 working system on GitHub, and suddenly became a hot topic in the public opinion field.

The programmer group has always been the show of the Chinese public opinion field, such as a lattice shirt, a backpack, and a straight man.In fact, these stereotypes are not enough to attract attention. There is only one reason for this group to receive strong attention: high salary.

The programmer is a high -paying group.High salary is a performance of strong negotiation capabilities for employees, but in overtime, it is relatively passive.This phenomenon is simply explained by a company's right to squeeze the rights of employees and workers by capital infringement.

So why do I need overtime?

From the perspective of economic laws, it is generally believed that the wage level is improved, and the workers will first choose to increase the working time to obtain more income. Therefore, the labor supply will increase, and the salary level is proportional to the labor supply volume.At this stage, the higher the salary, the more work will work, and the income of the Chinese is not high, so people tend to get more jobs in exchange for more wages.

From the perspective of the industry, the Internet industry is fiercely competitive and develops rapidly, and the company must work hard. From the specific work nature, programmers are often urgent, and there are often emergencies that need to be resolved, which will cause frequent overtime.These overtime overtime often forms a culture, and this culture will cause various unnecessary overtime.

When the company has insufficient management capabilities and cannot identify employees well, overtime becomes a superficial identification indicator. Therefore, in a department and a company, when someone is working overtime, others are forced to follow up overtime.Some companies even formed a strange model: dinner and drinking together, and then returned to the company to work overtime until the early morning.

There are two sides of everything. At the same time that the overtime mechanism exists, anti -overtime factors are also developing.

First of all, from the perspective of large economic laws, at first people would use work to change their income. As the wage level continued to increase, the marginal effect of income began to decrease after having a generous income.Straight, there is enough money, so the workers tend to leisure, thinking that leisure is more important than income growth.They would rather choose to increase leisure and reduce working hours, which has reduced labor supply. At this time, the salary level and labor supply volume become reverse.Simply put, at this stage, the salary is higher, and people are unwilling to work.

From the perspective of the industry background, the IT industry is an explosive growth industry in the past 30 years. Entrepreneurship, equity, and listing have constructed wealth myths after another.People from IT companies are willing to work overtime, which is a large extent a wealth effect.Entrepreneurship, options, bonuses, and dividends, these inspire practitioners within the industry to work overtime.However, with the end of the technical dividend, the growth of industry explosion has slowed down, and the economic downturn and other factors, wealth myths are no longer, and inspiration has also decreased.Although many companies 'income and profits are still growing at high speed, wealth is accompanied by risks. The risks of many companies have been released, and the ability to create employees' wealth myths is not as good as that year.

A more micro mechanism is that one hour later when the boss goes to work, if there are 100 subordinates, it can bring 100 hours of working time.The leaders of the department can bring 10 hours of working time for 1 hour after get off work.Although this description is not accurate, it is roughly established.Therefore, the company is committed to creating a variety of cultures, often with rituals of chicken blood, even dog blood, and even obsessive or insult.However, the company does not have force, and the foundation of chicken blood still needs to rely on interests. Therefore, once the supply of interests cannot keep up, we cannot continue to provide wealth expectations. The 996 working system will not continue.The person who initiated the entire incident this time was a young programmer. Obviously, among the big companies, various wealth expectations have little to do with him. Since then, why not be so desperate.

In addition, there is another reason that in the salary game of labor and capital negotiations, the organization and mobilization of the trade union have always been a very important variable, such as it can cause wage rigidity.In China's wages, the role of union is lacking, and it is difficult for employees, especially at the bottom employees to gather issues such as wages, labor time and other issues.The method adopted by China is the national replacement of unions and unified coordination. For example, the long vacation system for centralized vacation is an example of a state replacement of labor and capital negotiations.Leaving aside the advantages and disadvantages of it, this has higher requirements for law enforcement, and the eyes of law enforcement are densely required.At the same time, employees have a similar mobilization role to appeal, awaken, influence, and response through the Internet. It is a compensation for employees' bargaining power. In the end, it will form behavior when individual decisions.For example, when the programmer interviews, ask one more sentence: Will the company work overtime often?

In the face of this trend, it is said that some Internet companies have begun to block the community on their browsers. This is of course a Chinese -style wisdom behavior. This is not only obvious, but it has to lose money.

First of all, it tries to block the most anti -shielding group in China; secondly, this will affect the efficiency of programmers; more than, considering that Chinese Internet companies are not closed, it has become more and more to the world.Affecting the image of Chinese companies may also lead to direct legal risks.

After this incident, in GitHub, the open source community, paying attention to new technical legislation, and author of the University of Illinois NDASH, the University of Illinois, who is related to the law and practice in the specific field of China; Katt Gu, a doctoral degree of law, drafted a licensed agreement 996icu 996icu.EssenceThe rough content of the agreement is that individual or legal entities must strictly abide by relevant labor and employment laws, regulations, rules, rules and standards, or must abide by international labor standards.It is not allowed to induce or force their full -time or part -time employees or their independent contractors to directly or indirectly restrict, weaken or abandon what they own in verbal or written forms, and are related to the laws, regulations, rules and rules related to labor and employment.Rights or remedial measures for standard protection.

The drafters hope that this agreement can be restricted by the Chinese Internet company.His hope is theoretically established.Today, software development is basically impossible to use the open source code. When there are enough open source projects, the 996icu protocol is used. The enterprise forced the 996 working system, which is equivalent to its own product violations. Open source code owners can sue the company.Considering that Chinese IT companies are going overseas, or listing in Hong Kong or the United States, although the drafting of the agreement is a rational idea, this legal risk is substantially significant.

And this kind of risk is likely to expand rapidly, not only limited to open source communities, but also affects Chinese IT companies from a larger level and intensity.

In mid -2018, the European Union issued strict General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) to protect consumer data.What should be seen is that Europe has lagged behind this round of Internet economy. There are almost no large EU Internet companies. The strictest restrictions on this regulation are actually mainly targeted at the American IT company.The European Union is tightening in privacy protection and is not conducive to American companies. So, will Europe and the United States set a higher labor protection threshold in software products to limit Chinese companies?

In early April, when the 996.icu just began to spread on the Internet, Guido Van Rossum, the father of Python, reposted a report on the 996 working system of Chinese programmers in its Twitter, and said that the 996 working system was inhumane.A few days later, he published a post called Can We Do Something for 996 Programmers in China?How can we attract the attention of Western media and government?

PracticalIn this kind of external factors, it has been affecting companies operating in China.An obvious example is that when Foxconn accepts Apple OEM orders, Apple has the impact of Foxconn workers in terms of labor protection and welfare.Of course, here is not to talk about conspiracy theories.This is a way to naturally think of the competition between Chinese companies in the face of Chinese companies. Finally, through democratic mechanisms, it passed on to the policy level, becoming a natural response when Western countries facing the impact of low human rights advantages.

This reaction may not be bad for the Chinese.

When different economies compete in the short term, the low human rights advantage can indeed play a role, which is a low mode of competition.This seems to reduce costs and compete for bargaining.However, if one party cannot do low benefits and low human rights to reduce costs, some barriers may be established through law, such as better labor protection.This is like market competition, producing better quality and higher -tech products through innovation.This is a high mode of competition.

Competition may not be lower, and it will also be higher. This is the inevitability of Chinese companies to participate in international competition.When Chinese Internet companies go to the world, I am afraid that they must adapt to this high model of competition.

(This article only represents the author's own point of view, responsible editor: Yan Man [email protected])