Labour Research White-collar Groups Overtime

Since the industrialization, wages and working hours have been two important determining factors in workers’working conditions. With the deepening of China’s marketization process, overtime working phenomenon becomes more and more serious. The author, after a period of internship working in a private consulting firm in Beijing, found that overtime working and long time working without extra pay do exist, obviously violating laborers’rights and benefit.For further research on the referred labor problem, the author introduced the Marxist labor process research theory, penetrating into the labor scene through participant observation and in-depth interviews, to explore the causes of overtime working mechanism in white-collar workers’labor process.The author selects the field observation and in-depth interviews to collect materials, describe the working scene in the way of ethnography. At the same time, the statistical data of CGSS2006well demonstrates that the problem the author concerns is not individual but a universal social problem.The first chapter introduces the research’s significance and methods. The second chapter introduces the related theory resources including white-collar group, overtime working and labor time system, and finally chooses the overtime labor process of white-collar group as the research focus. The third chapter introduces the workplace that the author participated in the writing of ethnography, displaying the white-collar’s real working state.The fourth chapter reveals the formation of overtime working mechanism from visual aspect of settled arrangement and hidden control factors, then displays three different kinds of people’s attitude and action under the systematical arrangement. The fifth chapter is the conclusion, exploring the background of the overtime working, as well as discussing the nation’s attitude and the workers’future under the leading neoliberal economic policy.Study found that enterprises’visual system design, such as project responsibility system and flexible working time system, makes the laborers and the work of infinite possibility of overtime closely linked together. Laborers, bound by work, influenced by overtime working culture, working in a place constantly strengthen overtime working as a person’s excellent quality, have gradually internalized overtime working into individual action, becoming the tame lamb of overtime working reality. Minority individuals choose to exit quietly and join in another company, but cannot fundamentally change the social problem that working overtime do exist in numerals industries. White-collar group, supposed to have the driving force of social reform as well as the middle class, has become atomized individuals in the labor progress, losing the operation ability as a whole. Under the background of globalization, flexible work is a new trend of labor market. Although laws and regulations have been set to safeguard the laborers’welfare, they are difficult to settle down, leaving laborers’ rights in a blank state.