- As China Hacked, U.S. Businesses Turned A Blind Eye
In dozens of interviews with U.S. government and business representatives, officials involved in commerce with China said hacking and theft were an open secret for almost two decades, allowed to quietly continue because U.S. companies had too much money at stake to make waves.
Wendy Cutler, who was a veteran negotiator at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, says it wasn’t just that U.S. businesses were hesitant to come forward in specific cases. She says businesses didn’t want the trade office to take “any strong action.”
https://www.npr.org/2019/04/12/711779130/as-china-hacked-u-s-businesses-turned-a-blind-eye
- Alibaba founder defends overtime work culture as ‘huge blessing’
What is “996”?996 at a Chinese company means the workday starts at 9am, finishes at 9pm, with an extended 6 day week. The schedule is mandatory and there is no overtime pay or bonuses.
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“I personally think that being able to work 996 is a huge blessing,” he said in remarks posted on the company’s WeChat account. “Many companies and many people don’t have the opportunity to work 996,” Ma said. “If you don’t work 996 when you are young, when can you ever work 996?”
On Thursday, an opinion piece published in a state newspaper argued that 996 violated China’s Labor Law, which stipulates that average work hours cannot exceed 40 hours a week.
“Creating a corporate culture of ‘encouraged overtime’ will not only not help a business’ core competitiveness, it might inhibit and damage a company’s ability to innovate,” the unnamed author wrote in the People’s Daily.
- China Is Scoring Its Citizens. And Evicting The Poorest.
- A Microsoft exec shows how to handle an uproar at work without shutting it down
There are several things worth highlighting in the executive’s response. First, she acknowledges that the other woman’s feelings of frustration and disappointment are valid, and promises to set aside time for a one-on-one to discuss the woman’s experience of being denied promotions. In this way, her email models the advice from Daena Giardella, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, on how managers should handle sexual harassment claims. “Learn to take stories about sexual harassment in your organization seriously,” she wrote in a May 2018 piece for Quartz. “Be careful about snap assessments that a certain story or comment ‘is not a big deal,’ or not ‘worthy’ of being further investigated.”
Second, the executive declares that while she doesn’t want anyone to feel that it’s impossible to advance in this particular area, she knows that Microsoft has more work to do. And while she highlights the career resources and training programs that are underway in an effort to improve advancement opportunities at the company, she does not suggest that they will offer a silver-bullet solution.
Photo by Hanson Lu on Unsplash