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(Yicai Global) Jan. 5 -- Shanghai’s labor safety agency is investigating e-commerce platform Pinduoduo’s working environment and hours and the company’s labor contract, the agency said, addressing the sudden death of a 22-year-old woman employee who left work at 1.00 a.m., per the notorious "996” work system prevalent among China’s tech companies, Shanghai Observer reported yesterday.
Overtime is the norm among Chinese internet companies, which have formed the 996 system, i.e. starting work at 9.00 a.m. and leaving at 9.00 p.m. six days a week. The practice has been the subject of extensive scrutiny and discussion among the public in recent years. Pinduoduo has a strict clock-in/out system, with work starting at 11.00 a.m. and ending at 11.00 p.m. generally, with overtime on Sunday.
Zhang, born in 1998, joined Shanghai-based Pinduoduo in July, it said in a statement yesterday. She suddenly covered her belly and fainted and fell to the ground while with a colleague at 1.30 a.m. on Dec. 29. The co-worker immediately called a local hospital in Urumqi, capital of China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. Zhang passed away after nearly six hours of emergency treatment. Her cause of death is unknown as her family declined to have a post-mortem examination conducted. Her job was to recruit entrepreneurs on Pinduoduo’s Duoduo Maicai platform, which is an emerging online next-day grocery shopping business the firm embedded in its app in August after testing it on the WeChat mini-program.
A response to the employee’s sudden death that appeared on Pinduoduo’s official account on China’s Quora-like Zhihu question-and-answer platform yesterday read, “Look at the people at the bottom. They trade their lives for money. I have never considered it to be a problem of capital, but a problem of this society. This is an era when people have to fight to live,” screenshots circulating on the internet show. The soon-deleted statement has aroused heated online discussion.
Pinduoduo claimed a marketing partner’s employees had posted the comment, which did not reflect its stance. The company vehemently opposes the view expressed, it said, citing a lack of strict control over its official account to explain the screenshots.
“In the past few months, you may have felt some adjustments in the company’s organizational structure. We are particularly happy to see that, among our thousands of people, many are willing and able to fight at the frontline of new businesses, including Duoduo Maicai,” Chairman Colin Huang said in an internal speech in October celebrating the company’s fifth anniversary, adding all Pinduoduo employees were obligated to “activate the hard-core struggle mode.”
Editor: Ben Armour, Xiao Yi