[celticninja]

I have one response to all that.. fuck that noise.

On that basis I work 864, but I guess in China people are just another natural resource from which to extract value, once all the value is extracted (burned out) they dump that person and take the next one off the heap. Its a sad state of affairs that the Chinese think that this work ethic sets them apart from the rest of the world. It does in a way, but what it really allows is for the chinese government and chinese companies to make them work longer for less and to feel like they are special for doing so.

There is a reason that the west has labour/employment laws that protect people from this sort of exploitation. Sad to see that the chinese people have fallen for this sort of bullshit.

[blacktriangle]

It's the sad irony of collectivism. When you remove all concept of individual ownership and accountability in the name of universal equality, you've effectively destroyed the individual as a unit and just turned them into another resource to be taken advantage of, nominally for the good of the whole, but in reality for the good of the ruling party.

[dheera]

I don't think collectivism is at fault here. There are many places that are far more collectivist than the US but have extremely sane work schedules.

Germany comes to mind, in particular, as an example of how collectivism can actually help allow for sane work hours. I worked there for a few months. One of the things I deeply respected is that my co-workers were completely okay with the bakeries closing at 3:30pm, supermarkets closing at 6:30pm, being open for only 2 hours on Saturday, and completely closed on Sunday because "the supermarket employees also have families and need time to rest", words which you would almost never hear in the US. (In larger cities of Germany, supermarkets have longer hours, but rarely past 8pm or 9pm, and definitely never 24 hours like you often find in the US.)

What is at fault is rampant, extreme capitalism, which at that extreme milks humans of every last drop at the expense of their health, because their health is not a part of the financial optimization function at all. If you can profit by driving your employees to insanity, you profit, and that is deemed optimal by an extreme capitalist system.

(And before some social media flamewar-instigators accuse me of advocating for extreme communism, no, I'm advocating some balance between mostly captalism and some strong labor laws that everyone must abide by to maintain the physical and mental health of the country.)

[celticninja]

Well let's not saddle up the high horse so quickly. The same sort of issues apply to the US where collectivism/socialism is certainly not the norm. There the individual is powerless in the face of corporations and they are similarly exploited, except now instead of the ruling party doing the exploitation it's the ultra rich who take advantage of the individual.