Labour of love: Start-up founder Suji Yan and his wife Katt Gu published the ‘Anti-996 Licence’ that requires firms using covered code to agree to respect labour laws.The murmurs began on a Chinese programmer forum on March 26. The gruelling ‘996’ work hours — 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week — at tech firms in China was beginning to be discussed. Many of the participants were young men in their 20s, including 23-year-old Suji Yan, CEO of digital privacy start-up Dimension. A Shanghai local, Yan was part of the “group chats” from the “very beginning”.
In spring this year, something remarkable was taking place in China on social networking sites, including group chats on WeChat. The debate boiled over into a virtual “repo” or repository on Microsoft’s global code-sharing and collaboration platform, GitHub. The “996.ICU” repo allowed programmers from across the country to signal if their company was on the white list (good labour practices) or the blacklist or “evil”, as Yan calls it. Simply put, the repo was a caution that people working the 996 shift on a regular basis could end up in the intensive care unit. It was time for introspection. “It was like watching an old movie showing the conditions of factory workers,” says Yan.
If the Chinese idiom rèn láo rèn yuàn was about “working hard without asking for returns” and to bear the burden of office willingly, this movement appeared to be about making some noise having borne the burden. “This was very interesting to me. I had seen other people try similar things in the past, but this time there was a review process on a repo that was essentially debating work hours,” Yan says. “People were voting using emojis,” he adds. It was a community coming together to discuss whether a company followed Chinese labour laws and properly compensated its workers for overtime.
The first 48-72 hours produced several lists of good and bad companies. “But this alone wasn’t going to work,” he says, via WeChat video call, as we wait for his wife, Katt Gu, to join us. Gu is a legal consultant and researcher, who studies the intersection of modern technology and law. When Yan had asked her to take a look at the repo, she had first refused. “The reason I initially said no was because I thought it was just a complaint. People complain about their jobs all the time,” she says. But Yan kept bothering her. “When I looked, it actually fit perfectly into my research interest. This had not been deeply studied before and the material out there was written by programmers without a legal background. I thought maybe as a lawyer I should weigh in,” she adds.
Four days after the initial discussion, Yan and Gu published the “Anti-996 Licence”. Time was of the essence. “Something like this could fizzle out in a few days to a few weeks and I did not have time to draft an elaborate licence,” says Gu. She modelled it on the simple MIT Licence — an open source software.
Essentially, it put down two clauses, she explains. “Any individual or entity will have to comply with the laws of that jurisdiction, and if you are a multinational company then you have to comply with the laws of the jurisdiction, where the law is strictest across all the countries you operate,” says Gu. The International Labour Organisation standards also apply, including the right for workers to collectively bargain and a ban on forced labour, she says.
Since the English version was published on March 31, over 200 projects in China have adopted this licence. The movement is among the first-of-its-kind that drew sympathy from other industries. “The problem with previous debates was it did not get programmers any sympathy from outside the tech industry. They were the elites who made a lot of money, so why complain?” says Yan. “This time, it is very different. More people are accessing the internet and using apps and they are thinking about the people making these apps.”
The response over the “996 debate” has been surprising for the Chinese. While the techies anticipated that this will fizzle out as April proceeds, comments made by Alibaba group founder and billionaire Jack Ma endorsing “996” got the state media involved, propelling the movement to much higher ground.
On a Friday night, in an hour-long segment on China Radio International, experts debated the 996 work ethic, referring back to a time in the 1990s when China attempted to implement a five-day work week. “There were several concerns to change from six to five days. China state-owned enterprise reform was at its peak, there was a lot of unemployment, and the Chinese government felt it was actually a good time to push for private sector and a more diverse economy so people had more time to spend and not just work,” said an economist on the show.
Another speaker, a startup founder, made a comment on the 996 debate as an effective signal for labour violation in companies that do not have redressal mechanism. “In practice, I don’t think there are effective labour unions inside these tech companies or legal advisors to consult with,” he said about an environment in which collective action could also face consequences.
In the week following Ma’s comments, Gu was invited to participate in a panel discussion on the Chinese Central Television (CCTV). Meanwhile, the political theme song L’Internationale began trending on Chinese video sharing website, Bilibili. “It is a song that no one listens to. After Ma’s comments, it was being shared widely,” laughs Yan.
The point made by the Anti-996 Movement is, however, much more universal. Though it started in China, the same debate could extend to India, Japan and the United States, says Gu. “Pretty much any developing country,” adds Yan. Adopting a licence like this, they say, can bring about quick reform in the tech industry. “The programmers want to get their rights under Chinese labour laws. It is what they deserve. It is under scope of the legal system; it is not a political movement,” says Gu. What this also signals, she says, is a “significant movement within the open source community” in China and elsewhere.
The appearance on state media widened Gu’s thinking about the issue. The serious news segment, where the panel discussed the 996 schedule, made her see something very fundamental: a generation gap that comes with a different ideology. “The host, who must have been in her forties, said that when she was younger, Chinese people valued hard work. The simple message was that you can only become successful when you work hard,” she says. Gu phoned her mother after the show to ask her what she thought of Jack Ma’s comments. Her mother said she did not see anything wrong with his views. “People my age seem to value different things,” Gu says. “My mom thinks that my generation is too lazy.”
This article appeared in print with the headline ‘The Shape of Shift’.
