Office workers in China organise a rare online labour movement

IN THE WORLD’S most censored region of cyberspace, finding an unpatrolled spot to air shared grievances is hard. Yet disgruntled Chinese software developers have recently found one at their fingertips: GitHub, a platform owned by Microsoft that allows developers to help each other build software. Fed up with the grindingly long work hours imposed on them by China’s internet giants, this collective has recently built something else—a movement demanding more humane office hours and calling out the worst corporate offenders.

Their beef is the “996” regime, which refers to a work schedule of 9am to 9pm, six days a week, often without extra pay. Toiling such hours has become an unspoken rule in the frenetic world of Chinese tech. In late March anonymous activists created a webpage called 996.icu (the letters standing for “intensive care unit”). On it they listed firms at fault, including 58.com, a site for classified ads that popularised the 996 approach in 2016. A page with the same name was also set up on GitHub, which was also used to host a sister project called “955.wlb” (standing for “work-life balance”). This celebrates firms with more relaxed working hours. Almost all of those listed are foreign ones.