996.ICU, the Don Quixote style online labor rights movement goes underground
The article was originally published in Chinese. This machine-translated English version is for reference only.
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It was a typical working day. As usual, the alert group where Arlo works is constantly posting messages. In this Internet company, an automated monitoring program monitors the operation of the system around the clock and triggers an alarm when the performance exceeds the standard, such as when the CPU (central processing unit) utilization reaches 90%.
Suddenly, the alert log was swiped with the news of a colleague's sudden death due to terminal colon cancer. The obituary was stuck in the alarm log, which looked very conspicuous, but it was quickly swiped up. In larger companies, there may be hundreds of alerts per day, with new messages overwriting old ones. Those who saw it didn't have the energy to think too much about it; they had to rush to deal with the new alerts or they would be penalized.
And then, less than a week later, people can't quite remember even who that person is. "It feels like human life is just as quickly gone as a system alarm record. That's how I feel about the business." Arlo says. He works in IT-related jobs at the company.
During his two years as a developer in a "big factory" in China, Wu Min also saw an ambulance downstairs in the company. He did not know exactly who was taken away and was not allowed to talk about it in the company. He only knew that a colleague in a month or two, every night at two o'clock, seven o'clock in the morning to work, moving to sleep company, and finally got briefing praise. "I was like, this is not the right value."
In March 2019, this kind of pent-up resentment against Internet companies broke out centrally. A young programmer who had just graduated and first experienced the 996 work system registered the domain name 996.ICU, linking the struggle culture of the big factory with the cost of personal health, because "work 996, get sick ICU".
"Developers' lives matter."
Within a few days, this slogan has evolved into a very loud wave in 2019. Alo and Wu Min, who are both IT professionals, have become participants in this wave.
In the Internet industry, it is no secret that overtime work is common. But in recent years, more and more companies have turned it into an explicit system and implemented it in a big way.
A Xiaomi employee revealed in a previous interview with Punch News that it took him a long time to adapt to this normalized state of overtime work, "For 996, although inwardly it is rejected, my body and brain cells are not responsive to that point, and I am really sleepy. But I still think it's the right thing to do."
The same year that 996.ICU appeared, several incidents related to the 996 system occurred. In January 2019, Hangzhou-based e-commerce company Youzan announced the implementation of the 996 work system at the company's annual meeting; in March, some employees within Jingdong revealed that the 996 or 995 work system would be implemented in separate departments.
The 996.ICU website states that the 996 work system violates the current Labor Law and the State Council's Regulations on Working Hours for Employees. 996 work system requires that employees receive 2.275 times their current salary in order not to lose out on the economic account; and even if the money is paid, the 72 hours of work per week is far more than the 48 hours per week limit stipulated in the Labor Law.
"Developers' lives matter", the website ends.
On March 26, 2019, within days of the site's launch, a code repository with the same name appeared on GitHub, a code hosting platform for programmers around the world. Generally speaking, developers use these repositories to store code files, text, and images for a particular software project.
The repository called 996.ICU, quickly gained a lot of traction after its appearance, earning 50,000 stars in two days and reaching the top of GitHub's trending hotlist. The emergence of this repository gave a huge boost to the proliferation of anti-996, and really turned it from a slogan into a series of actions.
Unlike the static information on a website, GitHub is more like a square of noise. Not only can onlookers like the repository to show their support, but they can also get involved by revising or adding content. The repository owners can then merge the repositories and gradually enrich the original repository, or start more side repositories on top of the original one. Here, all changes are recorded and kept.
Xokctach, a participant, recalled in a previous interview that on March 27 alone, the project received more than 50 requests for merging, including correcting typos, adding new content, translating Chinese content into multiple languages, etc. The following day, 996.ICU added a voting function to "expose 996 companies and departments" and extended two related projects: 996. The next day, 996.ICU added a voting function to "expose 996 companies and departments" and extended two related items: 996 company blacklist and 955 company whitelist.
At the same time, people flocked to various social media platforms to create groups under the name 996.ICU to share their situations, gossip or give advice to each other. Slack, the office software used by developers to collaborate as a team, was also used by volunteers to discuss their next steps.
The group initially imagined many ways to keep the idea of 996.ICU in the public discourse and have a lasting impact.
For example, some people proposed to change their social media accounts to 996.ICU avatars one day; some people planned to create a set of emoji packs and memes and post them on WeChat Mall; some people wanted to advertise on more mainstream platforms such as Weibo and B-site, or raise funds to buy bus and subway station ads like the rice circle; some people wanted to make a game where programmers could work for themselves, and the name of the game would be The name of the game is: "Programmers can't die!"
While most of these ideas have remained in the discussion stage, there have been some widely supported ideas that have spawned sub-projects of 996.ICU that actually attempt to counter the 996 overtime system.
One of the best known of these projects is the "Anti-996 License" - simply understood, when an open source project adds the "Anti-996 License" to its own license agreement, any company that wants to use the project will have to use it. Any company that wants to use the project will need to abide by this agreement. This takes advantage of the nature of the open source community and means that the more projects that join the agreement, the more binding it becomes for companies.
It was at this point that Suji Yan, who had previously been observing the 996.ICU movement from the sidelines officially got involved. His wife, Katt Gu, J.D., of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, drafted the licensing agreement for the "anti-996 license".
At this stage, Suji believes that the people are brought together by 996.ICU have formed some sort of autonomy among themselves.
Unlike traditional forms of organization, there was no leader or central authority, and everyone could collaborate and submit ideas. It is up to the warehouse owners and volunteers to vote by "popular vote" on whether to merge their opinions.
Suji told AllNow that he was most impressed by the time an account proposed a revision to remove ByteDumps from the corporate blacklist, listing its own set of arguments. The move sparked a lot of backlashes and the merger ultimately failed. "It was a one-person, one-vote vote that ended up fucking him up, similar to the pottery piece banishment system at the Athenian Citizens' Assembly."
On April 11, 2019, Jack Ma talked about 996 in an internal Alibaba exchange meeting, saying, "Today China BAT (Baidu, Ali, Tencent) these companies can 996, I think it is the blessing that we people cultivate."
This statement made the anti-996 movement, which had been losing momentum, pushed back to a new high point of public opinion. In a related discussion in Zhihu, someone said that the so-called 996 is actually the objectification of people, "treating people as machines", and that "the great pain of modern people lies in 'self-objectification' without knowing it. "The great pain of modern people lies in 'self-objectification' without knowing it. Some screenshots also point out that in 2017, Ma said in an interview with the South Korean media, "I regret that I am busy working all day and have no time to spend with my family, if I could live again, I would never do that again."
On the following May Fourth Youth Day, 996action, a project group that advocates offline action to protest the 996 work week, organized a performance art-style offline event - sending Ma labor laws by registered mail.
The group's GitHub page shows that the campaign received more than a hundred photos of the labor law being sent, with one person posting a copy of the labor law directly to the glass of the Ant Financial Services office building.
At the same time, members launched another information disclosure request to local HSS bureaus, requesting disclosure of the annual plan for daily inspection and inspection of labor security departments, channels for reporting complaints, statistical tables of cases undertaken, and the response of labor departments from the fermentation of the 996icu action to the present.
But always, this decentralized organization is loosely organized, and people can come together quickly or disperse quickly due to various factors.
The disappearing warehouse owner
In May 2019, the trade war between China and the United States started, and the same hatred for overtime culture gradually drowned in a larger wave of public opinion.
Perhaps as a result, many people did not notice that the original warehouse owner, 996icu, disappeared.
The warehouse records stopped at October 20, 2019, when 996icu merged a revision request to add Dalian Winsea Technology Co. to the corporate blacklist and attached three screenshots of the internal group. After that, it never appeared again.
Although others relentlessly submitted new revisions and evidence of forced overtime by the company, they could only stay at the request stage. The warehouse has been abandoned, leaving an empty site.
Accounts vary as to why 996icu disappeared. "The possibility of theft is unlikely." Alo analyzed to All Now, " GitHub we [programmers] don't just throw away, even if we lose the password we can get it back. From a technical person's point of view, if the account is not even on, it can only be that something happened to the person. That's our guess."
In addition, several of the original core members of the group, including several of the organizers of the 996action operation, have also "disappeared" - which could mean they have changed their accounts, or they may have stopped participating and quit altogether, or are no longer active. Alo tried to communicate with a few of them, and one reminded him not to ask, not to pry, and then never came back online.
Despite positive comments from official media such as CCTV News and People's Daily, unlike the optimistic imagination of the organizers at the beginning, the anti-996 movement was not well received by everyone.
In April 2019, 996.ICU's webpage and GitHub homepage were blocked by some browsers and were inaccessible, displaying "illegal information" or "prompted by anti-pornography authorities. At the same time, Alo said that all of the QQ groups known internally as the Starfire group were blocked.
When organizing activities to send labor laws, volunteers also found it difficult to start topics on Weibo. Discussions on Zhihu and postings were also quickly deleted.
The GitHub repository issue section was shut down on March 29th of that year, when the 996ICU topic was at its peak, because the discussion had gotten out of hand. Before the shutdown, the repository had over 100,000 issues.
All of this prevented the spread of the anti- 996 discussion; offline actions also quickly became bogged down, further sapping the enthusiasm of participants.
The process of requesting information disclosure involved a cumbersome process, with volunteers checking regulations, sending information, receiving documents, and communicating by phone, which took about six months.
In November 2019, the main participant of 996action, "Ghost Seven," announced the results of the action on his Douban page. Suzhou, Jiangsu, replied directly to most of the information requested, including key annual plans, complaint channels and case statistics; Nanjing, Jiangsu, and Hangzhou, Zhejiang, gave statistical tables of labor inspection cases for 2017 and 2018 at the request of the court after a round of administrative reconsideration; Shenzhen, Guangdong, maintained its original response and did not disclose case statistics; and Chengdu, Sichuan, did not disclose any information, treating them all as "unpublished". The Chengdu Human Resources and Social Security Bureau in Sichuan did not disclose any information, considering it as "internal management information" and not providing it.
On May 20, 2019, the volunteers filed an administrative lawsuit against the Chengdu Human Resources and Social Security Bureau for information disclosure.
In the aforementioned Douban article by Ghost Seven, the lawsuit is described as "still in the communication stage. After this, both 996action's repository and Ghosty's Douban account stopped updating.
According to Arlo's description, the lawsuit eventually went slowly unanswered after a long wait.
Don Quixote and the Windmill
"Practically from the beginning, there was a big disagreement. Those who were mainly organizers of the first wave of the movement believed they could fight for their rights through existing legal channels; there was another part that had reservations and stayed on Discord and GitHub." Arlo said.
Discord was originally an instant messaging platform commonly used among gamers. It was formed at about the same time as 996.ICU's Slack group. It's more anonymous, but also more private, and those who stay here have greater privacy and security concerns.
Arlo fell into the latter category. in 2019, he was faced with the need to counter the reality that his company was promoting 996, so he didn't participate in the activities at the time, just observing from the sidelines at his leisure.
But as the first wave of operations bogged down, those who stayed in the shadows began to act. They backed up data and set up multiple resource points to prevent documents from being censored and information lost. On one side, they continued to record bad corporate behavior, gradually expanding the blacklist. By 2020, when the first wave subsided, the second wave of operations was taking shape.
"They were stepping on mines for us." Arlo says, "Let's call the first year of the campaign, for now, the Don Quixote Project."
Although the same concept was born out of 996.ICU, the organizers of the second wave have completely changed their thinking. Instead of trying to pressure companies or ask government agencies for help to stop excessive overtime, they wanted to help job seekers avoid the lightning by documenting corporate misdeeds.
They also realize that 996 is only one of the means. In fact, the concept of 996 was followed by 007, 715 and others. In September 2020, Jia Guolong, founder of the restaurant group Xibei, said on social media, " 996 is nothing, we are '715, white plus black', we are so desperate, often working 7 days a week, 15 hours a day, day plus night, and always meeting at night. "
In today's blacklist file, 996 is classified as "vicious overtime" under the rogue business behavior label. In addition, there are 15 other labels, including employment fraud, unpaid wages, workplace PUA, disguised layoffs, age discrimination, and employee suicide.
The blacklist is no longer limited to Internet companies, but extends to all industries that are suspected of violating labor laws and maliciously oppressing employees.
This echoes the questions the anti-996 movement had been met with - when 996.ICU dominated online headlines in 2019, there was some criticism that programmers were already well off and earning significantly more compared to the average year-round laborer, and that "you guys are only 996 in writing code and you're making a scene. It's too delicate".
This is also a common trend in online discussions, and the denunciation of 996 may eventually evolve into a "misery conference" that is more sympathetic than who is working harder.
In September 2020, an article titled "The 996icu Movement Continues" appeared in the long-dormant GitHub repository. The article said that it didn't want IT people to become a privileged group, but rather to provide technical support for all defenders through their unique technical skills. "We will seek dark justice in the gray zone."
fortunebot
The second wave of action put almost all of its efforts into recording the bad behavior of enterprises.
Part of this was done through web crawlers that automatically crawled the web for recorded information, including media reports, individual requests for help and exposures on forums, etc.; part came from information volunteered by participants.
This information is reviewed and uploaded, and desensitized when necessary. "For example, some compatriots will send out screenshots of the company's internal chat software, in fact, the chat background of those software are added with special noise, and after processing can show the work number of the screenshot taker." Wu Min explained to All Now.
Most companies don't put mandatory overtime in the open, so many of the evidence that tipsters come up with are internal group screenshots or meeting recordings. "Some of them can't even be removed by taking pictures, and the noise mixed in can be restored by using special decoding, which is equivalent to them having their own password book. This is when we need to identify, denoise, and then save."
"I heard that the big guy in the next node will also write a fake watermark into it, enough damage." Ah Luo added a crooked mouth smile emoji after this sentence.
In their view, this is the special advantage of 996. The risk control technology for employees is what the IT staff researches, so whatever new tactics emerge, there are immediate countermeasures. "Everyone is a leek, and IT people are still relatively united." Arlo said.
Compared to the high profile of 2019, the second wave of action was much more subtle. So much so that the vast majority of people on the internet believe that the notorious topic
corporate blacklist on GitHub could no longer be updated after the repository owners disappeared. The new corporate blacklist portal was placed in a Slack and Discord group, and can only be queried via an autoresponder bot they wrote.
In the Slack query group, type in @Fortune+Query+Company keyword and the records against the company in the database will pop up.
Previously, the list was circulated as an online document for a while, but it was reported and the link was invalid; some organizers also found that "some HR downloaded the file to hang public fishing, and some people added the group and found it was the boss squatting", so the document was no longer public in the group. The entrance has been narrowed step by step to the present form.
As of February 23, 2021, the public records available in 996.ICU's Discord node contain information from 2525 companies in 25 regions in China.
The group announcement prompts users not to use domestic social platforms to share data and links within the group, as well as, discussing corporate blacklists not to rise to the level of politics and class.
Whenever a member quits, bot sends a message, "Goodbye XXX, may there be no blessings in heaven.
Slack and Discord are just two of the publicly accessible nodes in the second wave of the operation, and there is a great deal of information that is not open to query or searchable by the common domestic censorship channels, Arlo said. They are scattered across different nodes, backed up as information on idle hard drives, with the nodes acting as backups for each other, archiving backups as soon as they feel the need, and then deleting and cleaning up traces.
Each node has a different person in charge, helping each other out, but no one knows who is in charge, "We don't poke around or look for other resource points. To prevent being swarmed."
He relays the words of one of the principals, "We are all ultimately there to protect ourselves." All Now's conversation with Arlo took place on a makeshift channel on Discord, and it ended with Arlo mentioning that he was seriously ill and didn't know how long he would live, and that he was "doing all of this and trying to leave something behind."
The channel was then immediately closed and deleted. Alo also changed his ID and disappeared into a sea of groups.
Legacy
To this day, 996.ICU's repository still holds the number two overall spot on the entire GitHub site with over 255,000 marked stars.
A month or two after the 2019 campaign broke, some people in the Slack group said that the action had allowed their companies to break away from 996 and that 996.ICU had been a success. But it was soon pointed out that many companies had simply given overtime a new shell, "They're starting to implement agile development, and they're giving you tasks that you have to do on your own if you can't finish them, so is that a form of forced overtime?"
Negative news about Internet companies continues to come out in droves.
In November 2019, a game planner at NetEase broke the news that he was violently laid off after suffering from a terminal illness, after which NetEase issued a note apologizing, saying that there was indeed rude and insensitive behavior; at about the same time, several media outlets published reports that Li Hongyuan, a former Huawei employee, was sued for extortion after leaving his job and was eventually released due to insufficient evidence, and had been detained for 251 days before his release, eventually Longgang District People's Procuratorate decided to grant him state compensation.
In turn, companies have created blacklists of job seekers.
Shanghai's Labor Daily reported that 37 companies, including Jingdong, Tencent, Baidu, Walmart China and Meituan Dianping, have formed the Sunshine Integrity Alliance, sharing a "blacklist" of employers among themselves, and after entering it, they will be rejected if they go to any of them for employment.
As early as April 2019, Zhejiang human resources department will promote the construction of human resources credit system, when frequent job-hopping and other behaviors may affect personal credit score. The Southern Metropolis Daily reported that in February this year, Jiaxing published the first "abnormal list of workers' rights", in which the names, portraits, genders and addresses of defenders were disclosed.
With a huge gap in resources and power between companies and employees, the idea of bypassing "bad companies" has an aura of over-idealism.
"If all factories are bad, where do you go?" Suji says. He was almost the only real-name participant in the entire anti-996 movement. He is now an independent entrepreneur and thus free from any corporate management constraints, but most of the participants other than him could not afford to pay that price.
After five years as a developer in China, Wu Min chose to leave the country after having a family and children. Now, he works 30 hours a week, from 9:30 to 5:00 p.m., and his boss hardly allows him to work overtime.
In addition to the long hours, he feels that the biggest difference between here and in China is the whole industry's attitude toward front-line development. "There are a lot of people in their 40s and 50s who have been doing front-line work here. Last week we recruited an old Ukrainian brother, who was 43 years old when he read his resume, and he worked happily after he joined us. But in China, they will feel that people in their 30s have all kinds of constraints and can't travel on business trips and say overnight on overnight. Young people who have just graduated are renting and can change their workplace at any time ......"
So much so that the age of 35 has become a career "watershed". Not only do many companies consider 35 to be the upper age limit for hiring, but employees over 35 are also worried about "optimization" layoffs for various reasons. This anxiety has been explored by the Daily People, with one retailer quoting a former colleague who said, "At my age (39), I can't keep up with my physical strength and energy, and I can't compete with others in overtime, so sooner or later I will be replaced."
Many people, like Wu Min, made the same choice after realizing that they could not change the status quo. Leave, one of the 996.ICU sub-projects, is dedicated to introducing jobs to people in China who want to leave the 996 environment through IT engineers employed overseas. This project has received more than 4000 stars and is still running and updated to this day.
Discussions around 996.ICU still pop up from time to time on the programmers' forum V2EX. Some people are disappointed with the results of the campaign, and feel that neither the net-wide denunciation nor the criticism from the official media has brought about any change in the company, but instead has led more small companies to follow the management model of 996.
A netizen named @songhui4123 thinks: 996icu is a success. It triggered programmers to think about their own situation. Before that, few programmers even thought about the rationality of 996, thinking that it was a struggle, that it was the path to success.
Suji holds a similar view. In his view, the anti-996 movement has emerged because the illusion that programmers have been steeped in for the past decade has been shattered, and people are realizing that they are not fundamentally different from other workers.
In this sense, he writes in his paper "996.ICU - The Continuation of the Free and Open Source Software Movement and Data as a New Form of Labor", the essence of the 996.ICU movement is a decentralized, spontaneous, transnational, platform built on the Internet and various new technologies "workers' movement".
Only, they are building the infrastructure of the digital world. This world is replacing the physical world and becoming ever larger and more complex. As the gatekeepers of the digital world, IT people, who could have a greater voice, are being held captive to write programs that involve everyone in the system. And the anti-996 movement is a gradual awakening.
"The funny thing about this is that in a country like China, which is the fastest cybering, some of the engineers are lighting a fire of rebellion, even though they don't know what they're rebelling against," Suji said. Suji said.
Some rebelled against overtime, others against not being paid enough for overtime ...... After achieving their goal, some quit. But as long as there are people left, the movement will continue, because GitHub collaboration is inherently forkable, and there will always be people who take over and continue to contribute.
The second wave of action that Arlo is involved in seems to be a testament to this.
The high dependence of Internet companies on the open source community today prevents them from banning GitHub outright, as they did with 996.ICU. But even so, many people were concerned when 996.ICU was blocked by numerous Chinese browsers in April 2019. On April 24 of that year, Microsoft and GitHub employees started a joint petition to pressure Microsoft to keep the 996.ICU GitHub repository uncensored and available to everyone.
Suji is optimistic about the future of anti-996, and believes there will be wave after wave of challenges to it. He has a prediction that within a year or two, a company will emerge that supports platform collaborationism, allowing programmers to fundamentally change the current "big-factory-is-king" web system through a completely open collaborative approach.
There are already many "platform co-op" APPs around the world, such as La`Zooz, a decentralized, community-based, cryptocurrency-based carpooling service launched by Israeli developers, and Loconomics, an app founded in San Francisco that connects the demand and supply of local services. Loconomics is an app that connects the demand and supply of local services.
On Loconomics, all service providers are called "owners" who jointly own the company and can elect a cooperative board to make decisions together. As for the profits generated from the operation, they no longer go to only a few people at the top of the corporate pyramid, but are distributed according to the contributions of the "owners".
(Allo and Wu Min are pseudonyms in the article)
link to the original article:https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/3...
