A deep look at the | work dilemma in the Internet age: How do we define "overtime"?

Recently, the sudden death of the acting leader of the Wuhan Graphic Review Team of the Wuhan Graphic And Text Review Team of the Internet Head Enterprise B Station has aroused widespread concern from public opinion.

The latest development is that the company publicly apologized, saying that the relevant communication and aftermath work after the employee's death was once facing chaos, and said that it would increase the recruitment of 1,000 people this year, effectively reducing the per capita work pressure.

Of course, the sudden death of employees is a tragedy, but in addition to sympathy, there are still some important issues that deserve to be discussed and discussed. For example, in the Internet era, the work system of many "big factories" has been completely different from that of traditional enterprises and institutions, so how do we redefine "overtime"? Under the new type of labor relations, how to ensure the legitimate rights and interests of grass-roots employees?

How to define employee "overtime"

In recent years, the high-intensity overtime culture of Internet manufacturers has become more and more socially visible, but more and more discussed positions such as programmers, and auditors are still very unfamiliar to many people.

But people in the industry know that auditors have always been relatively "marginal" but labor-intensive positions in large factories. In recent years, with the increased attention to content risks, the pressure on auditors has continued to increase.

Take Station B, for example, its Hong Kong stock prospectus discloses that by the end of 2020, the content screening team has about 2400 employees, and it needs to review and monitor the content uploaded to the platform 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

In fact, the manual review work of many Internet platforms has been questioned by the outside world because of content problems. The risks and pressures of the auditor position can be seen.

To ensure that there are personnel on duty 24 hours a day, the so-called middle and night shifts are indispensable. We can find some recruitment needs of Internet companies to review the work from the website, and the working hours marked are: morning shift 9:00-21:00, evening shift 21:00-9:00, middle shift 12:30-24:30.

This means that each shift lasts up to 12 hours. And in the relevant job description is also clearly marked: this post has a night shift, do a break, mind not to vote.

It can be seen that even if the unfortunate sudden death of the employee "did not have overtime" in the week before the incident, the nature of his position has been determined, and his working hours and work pressure are beyond many ordinary positions.

This is not a problem that Station B has to face, but a common problem in this position and even the industry. Because it is necessary to ensure the safety of website content, but also to ensure the efficiency of content creation and uploading, it is bound to direct the pressure to employees engaged in review work.

Relatively blurred work-time boundaries

To define whether the labor rights and interests protection of the auditor is in place, in addition to the intuitive total working hours, there may be special characteristics such as continuous high-intensity work and a large number of night shifts, whether to give special consideration.

For example, the night shift, even if it is the same as 8 hours, the consumption of personal energy is obviously not the same as the day shift. It is obviously not fair to calculate remuneration and overtime based only on working hours, as in the case of day shifts.

Speaking of the particularity of its work, auditors at other major factories revealed that their daily task volume is 500 to 1,000 pieces of content, and under such performance pressure, employees may need to constantly stare at computer screens. The same is 8 hours, and those who can still "touch the fish" compared to the position, the intensity is obviously not the same.

Of course, many large factories may have taken into account its particularities to a certain extent, such as the "do one rest and one rest" regulation for night shifts. But whether this situation is common, or whether it is more scientific to consider the pressure of individual work, we need to continue to observe.

In many industries, including the Internet, a common feature is that the boundaries of working hours in some positions are becoming increasingly blurred. Although some are nominally 8 hours, they actually need all kinds of overtime, shifts or duty, and even "need to respond at any time", and the time actually invested by employees is far from the time recorded by the company's attendance.

Sometimes it is easy to lead to disputes, when companies feel that employees are not working overtime, and employees have words of suffering. This is also a new test for the refinement and improvement of the protection of workers' rights and interests.

Expectations for Internet giants

The tragedy of sudden employee death also has an unexpected element, which is not necessarily the responsibility of the company. However, in the new situation, the discussion on the protection of workers' rights and interests also needs to be more in-depth.

From a legal point of view, the difference between "overtime" and "duty" and "shift" is very different. The Labor Law only makes relevant requirements for the eight-hour work, and does not mention the difference in salary for different periods of work, so enterprises treat employees on shifts equally, and rarely consider the efforts of employees during special periods such as night shifts.

A more humane approach might be to set different wage standards for different shifts to compensate for the actual loss of workers caused by factors such as health. The legal norms in this regard should also keep pace with the times.

From the perspective of welfare benefits, the attraction of Internet manufacturers is still very strong. This is also the reason why the position of the big factory still makes the "hit worker" flock to it. Therefore, while gaining high attention, Internet manufacturers should also set a better example for society and assume more social responsibility.

An Internet company recruiting 1,000 more auditors is not too much of a burden on its overall operating costs, but if it can alleviate the work pressure of thousands of people and create more jobs, it is not a good thing.

Of course, this is not to advocate that enterprises "raise idle people", but to expect Internet manufacturers to design a more reasonable personnel structure, to go out of the way of more innovative value, and not to base the hope of profit on compressing the necessary personnel expenses. In this regard, I believe that many Internet manufacturers still have room for improvement.