Is Japanese society really an "overtime hell"?

Japanese society has always been presented to the Chinese people as an "overtime hell".

Every day, in Tokyo, which has the highest population density in the world, office workers who get up at 6:30 flock to subway stations, squeezing each car like a can full of sardines. After an hour's long journey, these white-collar workers started a busy day in their respective companies. Working from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., many people can’t drag their exhausted bodies home until the early hours of the morning.

In such an atmosphere, Japanese employees "have to work overtime if conditions permit, and work overtime even if conditions are not met." The average weekly working hours is close to 50 hours, leading the world and becoming a veritable overtime country. , recognized by the outside world as "overtime hell". Therefore, as early as the 1990s in Japan, news of death by overwork and suicide caused by overtime had appeared frequently in the newspapers. At that time, few Chinese people thought that Chinese society would reach this point.

In 2006, "China Economic Weekly" published a report stating that as many as 600,000 people die "suddenly" in China every year. This extremely controversial figure was later interpreted by some media as death from overwork and reprinted, causing an uproar in society. But amid the public uproar, Chinese workers in various industries are still getting off work later and later.

In last month’s National Bureau of Statistics data, the average weekly working hours of employees nationwide reached 46.5 hours, half an hour more than the same period last year. Some online experts say that 90% of industries in China work more than 40 hours per week, and 50% of industries work more than 4 hours of overtime per week; more than 80% of workplace workers are "forced to work overtime" and 70% of "overtime workers" work overtime for free. Among them, the most ruthless ones are Huawei and Country Garden, which are well known to the public.

The first is Huawei. The average overtime hours for employees is 4 hours. They have camp beds under their desks. Whenever they encounter a major project, they work overtime and stay up all night in the company for days and nights. Because it also led to many jokes, in addition to the well-known Japanese experts, there was also a Huawei employee who sent a text message to his wife. The employee sent: "Honey, go to bed early, I may have to go back at 11 o'clock." Sure enough, the second Got home at 11 o'clock that day.

Country Garden’s overtime culture became popular among friends through a document requiring designers to work overtime all night to produce drawings. In addition, in order to allow employees to work overtime, Country Garden has also made the following regulations: if the project is delisted and the start of construction exceeds 40 days, the total resignation will occur; if the start of construction exceeds 7 months, the total number of employees will be dismissed; departments that leave work on time are not allowed to add employees. There are rumors that many graduates who entered Country Garden could only cry secretly because they could not bear to work overtime, and were ridiculed by the old man: "What, there is still time to cry, it seems that the work is not saturated."

Although this Overtime work at both companies is extremely serious, but their achievements cannot be underestimated.

Through the overtime work of 180,000 employees, Huawei has flexed its muscles in various businesses. It first competed with Ericsson in the communications business, and then stole a large market from Samsung in the mobile phone business. In addition, it also involved storage and network equipment. , cloud services in many fields. And its achievements are even more impressive: it ranks first in the world in 5G patents, shipped more than 200 million mobile phones, and its revenue in 2018 was more than the total of BAT.

In contrast, Country Garden has implemented a "high turnover" strategy through the intensive overtime work of its employees: it shoots land all over the country, develops it immediately after acquiring the land, and completes the sales within 6 months. funds, and then continued to acquire land for development. It is precisely through this tactic that Country Garden, a local developer in Shunde, squeezed out the position of its big brother Vanke and became the so-called "the largest real estate company in the world."

Of course, the differences between Huawei and Country Garden Making a fortune, in addition to the overtime dedication of employees of their respective companies, is also inseparable from the influence of good opportunities. The former enjoys the engineer dividends brought by the popularization of higher education, and at the same time catches up with the explosion of mobile Internet in the country; the latter bets on the national destiny and waits for the explosion of the domestic real estate market. However, most entrepreneurs cannot see or wait for the two opportunities. In order to make profits and survive, they can only choose another path:

Let the company's employees work overtime as much as possible.