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Post by easye on Sept 25, 2023 10:48:04 GMT -5
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Post by easye on Oct 5, 2023 10:23:08 GMT -5
After lifting COVID restrictions, China is having its own version of the Great Resignation. www.cnn.com/business/financial-calculatorsWhy China’s young people are quitting their jobs and throwing ‘resignation parties’What is interesting is that China all ready has a youth unemployment problem. I am not smart enough to tie it to larger trends in the world and the West, but I am sure some folks on the boards has some idea of what is going on.
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Post by Disciple of Fate on Oct 5, 2023 10:55:06 GMT -5
China's youth unemployment problem is not very different from the ones we saw in Europe and the US at the end of the 00's and early 10's. Just a terrible economic situation (in this case caused by the CCP's lockdown strategy) that means companies stopped recruiting (for years) and young people having trouble attending higher education. So you get this group of people falling into a socioeconomic gap of 'the covid years'.
As different as China sometimes is, some concepts just observe a sort of universal truth if you will, economic crises hit young people hardest as it kneecaps their educational/professional formative years and everone wants a decent work life balance. People realize working 10/6 isn't a virtue, especially when it adds no discernable improvement to your overall standard of living. Even China has a cost of living crisis.
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Post by pacific on Oct 6, 2023 7:58:08 GMT -5
Out of interest, does anyone know what the work ethic and standard working hours are like in China? I lived in S Korea for a couple of years and it was very much the 'salary man' concept of 50-60 hours a week being quite normal, and there being an expression in Korean for basically dropping dead at your desk (which I think definitely says something). I never knew if this was something that an Asian/Confucian cultural factor, or had been inherited from the US following the presence there (and I wondered if that was why it was like it in Japan also). I knew of a few Koreans who had re-settled in Europe in a quest to find some sort of work-life balance. As for China, although I can hazard a guess that it would probably be similar to Japan and Korea in that regard (and there to be relatively few rights to protect workers) it's not something I have ever read about.
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semipotentwalrus
Ye Olde King of OT
A somewhat powerful marine mammal.
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Post by semipotentwalrus on Oct 6, 2023 9:04:44 GMT -5
From what I've read about Japan they seem to suffer from working harder rather than smarter. Fax machines still haven't been replaced by PDFs and e-mail, everything is absurdly hierarchical, and the Yamato damashii concept* means you just have to Grit your teeth and endure it. Better hope you didn't end up born a woman or you get the lovely fist of sexism straight in your face on top of it.
*Yamato damashii, roughly "Japanese spirit", is the perceived inherent force that defines the Japanese people. Part of it is the ideal of persevering through any hardship without ever giving up and coming out victorious through superior willpower. Anyone who's watched Dragon Ball knows the trope; Goku is more or less the incarnation of this part of the ideal. It led to quite a bit of horrific stuff in WW2 and is part of why surrender was seen as something so shameful. When at its worst it's more or less "lift yourself up by your bootstraps by force of will".
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Post by Disciple of Fate on Oct 6, 2023 11:09:36 GMT -5
It very much depends on where and who you work for in China. Some work 40 hours a week, some Chinese workers make 8-10 hour days, 6 days a week. The 996 concept is also something that you might have vaguely heard of, the idea of working from 9 to 9, 6 days a week: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_systemAs for Japan, I work for a Japanese company in Europe. As Walrus says, it really is work harder and not smarter. If you (as a Japanese employee) do not put in 1-2 hours of unpaid overtime a day, you can wave goodbye to any sort of promotion. Working 10-12 hours on a workday is not abnormal, but the contract states 8 hour days. They are always available, even when off work they are expected to check emails and take calls. Here they have many more labor rights, that they purposely do not use, because they know they eventually have to return to Japan. Any sort of real decision making has to go through the sluggish Japanese societal hierarchy. There is no independent action that isn't approved 'upstairs'. This is a global, billions of dollars company, but we have to receive approval from the actual president of the company to spend over 10.000 euro/dollar (instead of the Japanese management in Europe). It's absolutely inane and its almost a miracle that a lot of large Japanese companies have gotten to the point they are today. We work closely with two other global Japanese companies and the differences are minimal. As European staff, we get away with just acting instead of waiting on Tokyo, but we can't get away with spending larger amounts. We don't get promoted into the Tokyo hierarchy, so there is less risk in taking independent action for the company and ignoring Japanese work expectations and pointing to European labor laws. They barely know we exist, consider us an almost necessary evil. They just don't understand the European mentality. It's an almost monthly occurrence that I have to explain to them that legally they can't do something (take away stored vacation hours or ask why someone is sick etc.). We have had ex-employees sue the company over breaches of labor law, that ended up vastly more costly than they needed to be, because Japanese management gets absolutely paralyzed by the idea of their employees taking them to court and are too ashamed to contact Tokyo about it. A 50.000 euro handshake deal in situations like this turns into a 250.000 two year legal anchor. Which in turn gets explained away to Tokyo as just how things work here. Which in fairness they sort of do, but they could have totally and legally avoided that, but it would lead to loss of face by admitting how the problem began in the first place: not listening to staff and being ignorant of/not inquiring about local law before the problem arises. If you are strong enough to resist workplace pressure, the European contracts are great, but they just try to suck you in. The Japanese have a term for dropping dead at work too btw: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi
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semipotentwalrus
Ye Olde King of OT
A somewhat powerful marine mammal.
Posts: 980
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Post by semipotentwalrus on Oct 6, 2023 16:01:11 GMT -5
The whole rigid hierarchy thing is what more than anything else lost Japan WW2 as well. Damage control on a naval vessel does not allow for rigid hierarchies without initiative, which is how you get things like an aircraft carrier where the flight deck literally ripples before the whole thing explodes from uncontrolled fires.
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Post by pacific on Oct 9, 2023 8:48:24 GMT -5
Some really interesting posts there guys, thanks for commenting I enjoyed reading them. I do find these things, highlighting differing cultural norms, absolutely fascinating. My experience of Korea very much matched those of 9-9-6. I will say I doubt very much that more work was actually done when compared to 9-5, as for the most part it just consisted of making it look like you were busy, waiting until the boss left and then you left after them, but really they were just twiddling thumbs a lot of the time. Interesting on the gender norms too. While I was in Korea (around '10 and '11) they had only just had the 'pinching a female staff member's bum is not acceptable' conversation, probably a good 20+ years after Western offices had been through that change. I think in that case, the social changes had not kept pace with the rapid technological/industrial progression of the country.
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Post by punishedmcbogus on Oct 9, 2023 22:15:10 GMT -5
very much a "just my personal experience" but when I dated a Chinese girl, and she moved back to China she would regularly do INSANE overtime, shit like pull off 48 hours in the office and stuff like that. The paid leave was okay (as standards go. Currently dating a nurse in Japan, she got the longest holiday we've had in nearly 3 years - 4 consecutive days off!). Said Chinese ex worked in a gaming software company making shovelware f2p moba type stuff. Little prospect of promotion, little prospect of getting into a big company bc of the Great Firewall.
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Post by easye on Oct 18, 2023 9:08:02 GMT -5
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Post by easye on Oct 23, 2023 10:23:55 GMT -5
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Post by Disciple of Fate on Oct 24, 2023 10:21:57 GMT -5
It is working for China though, which is currently violating UNCLOS in a massive way and getting away with it. Even the Phillipines are being slowly whittled down, every Chinese disruption increases the chance of the Phillipines being unable to maintain their presence on these glorified rocks.
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semipotentwalrus
Ye Olde King of OT
A somewhat powerful marine mammal.
Posts: 980
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Post by semipotentwalrus on Oct 24, 2023 11:33:20 GMT -5
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Post by easye on Oct 24, 2023 13:08:40 GMT -5
It is working for China though, which is currently violating UNCLOS in a massive way and getting away with it. Even the Phillipines are being slowly whittled down, every Chinese disruption increases the chance of the Phillipines being unable to maintain their presence on these glorified rocks. The problem is that it is also pushing the Philippines back into the US diplomatic orbit, and that would be a disaster for their Taiwan invasion and pushing out beyond the first line of islands.
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Post by Disciple of Fate on Oct 25, 2023 4:12:27 GMT -5
It is working for China though, which is currently violating UNCLOS in a massive way and getting away with it. Even the Phillipines are being slowly whittled down, every Chinese disruption increases the chance of the Phillipines being unable to maintain their presence on these glorified rocks. The problem is that it is also pushing the Philippines back into the US diplomatic orbit, and that would be a disaster for their Taiwan invasion and pushing out beyond the first line of islands. China doesn't really care about that anymore, it just wants to claim what they think is theirs. Taking these islands gives China some form of strategic depth that would come into play in the case of a war around Taiwan. The Phillipines don't really present a threat to China and their hope is that Taiwan falls before a big US response, after which they will try to use these islands in an area denial strategy. It makes 'sense' for China from a military perspective, which is the worrying part.
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