Thousands of Chinese workers reveal their hours as part of a campaign to 'boycott' the grueling '996' corporate culture

• An online campaign is urging Chinese workers to "boycott" the country's '996' work culture.
• The number 996 stands for a grueling 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six-days-a-week schedule.

Chinese workers are being encouraged to boycott the excessive "996" work culture that's common in some large firms by adding their names to an online campaign.

The number 996 stands for 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. These long hours were initially prevalent within the nation's increasingly dominant tech firms, but have seeped into other sectors.

The Worker Lives Matter campaign wants people to name their employer and detail their working hours in a spreadsheet. The sheet has already attracted more than 6,000 entries, including from some people claiming to work for some of China's largest companies, Bloomberg first reported.

A description on the Github page announcing the campaign said that it's aim was to raise awareness so that job seekers can make more informed choices.

"We hope to contribute to the boycott of '996' and the popularization of '955,'" one of the creators said in a separate post on the question-and-answer site Zhihu. In this case, 955 would mean 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., five days a week.

It comes amid growing resentment against the culture of overwork, which has been blamed for the deaths of several exhausted workers, including a 22-year-old employee at the tech company Pinduoduo.

In 2019, a group of Microsoft and Github employees published an open letter in support of another online campaign against 996.

In August this year, China's Supreme People's Court and Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security issued a report defining what constitutes overtime, and cases where companies have breached it.

Unpaid overtime is already illegal in China, but the state ministry indicated that it was in the process of tightening existing guidelines, according to Bloomberg.