Working 996, what a way to make a living
If Dolly Parton had been Chinese, there can be little doubt that her hit song 9 to 5 would have needed a little adjustment. Thanks to Jack Ma, executive chairman of Chinese internet giant Alibaba, we now know that the Middle Kingdom’s equivalent would have to be “996” – that is, nine to nine, six days a week.
The billionaire has provoked a row by writing online that working such hours is “a huge bliss”. “If you want to join Alibaba, you need to be prepared to work 12 hours a day. Otherwise why even bother joining?” he wrote, suggesting that for the right employees this hardly counts as overwork because they are pursuing
their passion. The need to see one’s children or spouse occasionally does not seem to factor into his thinking.
China has now been outproducing and outworking the West for decades. But its economic progress has been so fast that it has skipped phases of development that took us several generations. In many cases, parents who started life as peasants now find themselves with middle-class, urban hipsters for children.
A culture of hard work still pervades amongst these ambitious urbanites, but it now has a counterpoint in the form of phenomena like Sung Tea. Sung is a highly successful brand for defeatist millennials, selling drinks like “achieved-nothing black tea” and “my-ex-ismarrying-someone-withrich-parents fruit juice”. Such consumers certainly don’t sound like model Alibaba employees.
On the bright side for Mr Ma, however, China’s middle classes still only account for a third of the population. That leaves plenty of poor workers potentially still available for the “huge bliss” of working “996”.
Carmakers are supposedly now getting their act together to fix the rather massive security flaw brought about by new “smart keys”, which open one’s car electronically. The keys’ signals have proved so easy to intercept that they are behind a recent spike in car theft.
That still leaves another problem. The other day, my car displayed a new alert. “Smart key battery low,” it said. It’s the kind of notice you’d normally put on the backburner, like the ones about washer fluid. But reconsidering, I realised that this little problem could actually lock me out of my car in the middle of a journey. Unlike an old, “dumb” key, a “smart key” has no manual override. So far, though, I still haven’t worked out how to open up the thing or charge it.
No, it doesn’t sound very “smart” to me either.