Under the hashtag #China has 11 days of public holiday a year, a blogger writes, “I’ve looked it up, and American has 11 days of public holiday in a year. Britain has 10, Italy has 12, and France also has 11. That’s the amount of guaranteed paid leave you get.
The reason a holiday doesn’t feel like a holiday in China is because you have to work on the weekend to make up for it. Never experienced this in any other country. I figure it’s because China hasn’t had a labour movement. Western countries had labour movements; employers can’t force you to work weekends unless that’s an explicit part of the work contract.
Yeah, it's a phenomenon unique to China. That, and like the blogger said, workers aren't even guaranteed 2 days off a week. There's a lot of people who already only have one day off a week, who then have to work that day off to make up for the public holidays they took. I saw one comment by a guy who's like, "I'm getting 4 days off for Golden Week, but it also means I have to work 10 days in a row before Golden Week and 14 days in a row afterwards." That's horrifying.
People blame "involution" as the reason why Chinese people work such long hours, because if you refuse to do it, then there's thousands of people eager to volunteer for the opportunity. There's such a labour oversupply in China that people have driven wages far below what's normal and driven work hours to be the longest in the world (I think. It's at least up there). And a lot of people conclude this is because "China has too many people." So they're celebrating the low birth rate.
But honestly, I'm pretty sure it's because of the deflation. Not only are a lot of businesses failing because of the economic catastrophe that's going on, but even the surviving ones are buckling down to get through some hard times. So everyone's doing lay offs, pay cuts, etc, etc, worsening the labour oversupply problem. It's a whole mess. For Chinese New Year this year, people theoretically only got half a day off, you know.
The reason a holiday doesn’t feel like a holiday in China is because you have to work on the weekend to make up for it. Never experienced this in any other country. I figure it’s because China hasn’t had a labour movement. Western countries had labour movements; employers can’t force you to work weekends unless that’s an explicit part of the work contract.
Yeah, it's a phenomenon unique to China. That, and like the blogger said, workers aren't even guaranteed 2 days off a week. There's a lot of people who already only have one day off a week, who then have to work that day off to make up for the public holidays they took. I saw one comment by a guy who's like, "I'm getting 4 days off for Golden Week, but it also means I have to work 10 days in a row before Golden Week and 14 days in a row afterwards." That's horrifying.
People blame "involution" as the reason why Chinese people work such long hours, because if you refuse to do it, then there's thousands of people eager to volunteer for the opportunity. There's such a labour oversupply in China that people have driven wages far below what's normal and driven work hours to be the longest in the world (I think. It's at least up there). And a lot of people conclude this is because "China has too many people." So they're celebrating the low birth rate.
But honestly, I'm pretty sure it's because of the deflation. Not only are a lot of businesses failing because of the economic catastrophe that's going on, but even the surviving ones are buckling down to get through some hard times. So everyone's doing lay offs, pay cuts, etc, etc, worsening the labour oversupply problem. It's a whole mess. For Chinese New Year this year, people theoretically only got half a day off, you know.