![]() Many social media users called for boycotts against Pinduoduo, and local officials announced investigations into the company. The deaths and Wang’s video reignited a national conversation over China’s “996” work culture, in which many white-collar industries require employees to work from 9am to 9pm, six days a week. “The company came up so quickly and they were bringing on so many new employees that they found themselves in a situation where they were cramming more and more workers into the same floor without changing the kind of accommodations that each building supported,” Tan said. In some cases, there were as few as eight bathroom stalls for a floor with over 1,000 workers, forcing workers to stand in long lines or sneak into neighboring buildings, according to Tan. Wang also complained about severe overcrowding in Pinduoduo’s offices, and a dire shortage of bathrooms, an issue that attracted significant attention in China. Pinduoduo did not immediately respond to a request from the Guardian to comment for this story.Ĭolin Huang, founder of Pinduoduo, in 2017. Wang subsequently published a lengthy video on the video-sharing site Bilibili detailing labor abuses he had witnessed at the company he alleged that some workers were made to work as many as 380 hours a month, which the company denied.Ī spokesperson said at the time that it fired Wang not for posting the photo of the worker, who the company said had a “stomach problem”, but for making “extreme comments with obvious malice”. ![]() The controversy grew when days later, a Pinduoduo employee who called himself Wang Taixu said he had been fired by the company after posting a photo of a colleague being taken into an ambulance after collapsing. The second worker, an engineer in his 20s, jumped to his death on 9 January after abruptly asking for leave from the company and traveling home the same day. The first worker, 22-year-old Zhang Fei, died on 29 December, when she was heading home around 1.30am after a series of extremely long shifts. Two Pinduoduo employees died within a two-week period from December 2020 to January 2021, igniting a national scandal. “The competition is extremely intense, and the conditions are much crueler than in America.” “Pinduoduo is known for its extreme overtime,” said Li Qiang, a veteran labor activist and founder of the non-profit China Labor Watch. “I think that’s really going to be part of their strategy in coming to the US.”īut the company’s rapid growth has come at a cost. “Like Shein, Pinduoduo mastered the supply side in terms of delivering products at incredibly cheap and incredibly low cost to customers,” Tan told the Guardian. ![]() The company’s model has similarities to Shein, the controversial Chinese ultra-fast-fashion brand that uses tight manufacturing networks to churn out trendy clothes to young western buyers. ![]()
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