E-commerce Company Jingdong.com Faces Unfair Dismissal Controversy
Discipline Reestablished with Lunch Break Reduced from 2 Hours to 1 Hour
China's leading e-commerce company JD.com is facing controversy for unfair treatment of some employees and notifying them of dismissal without reason.
On the 25th, the Chinese retail industry reported that JD.com notified some members of its marketing, procurement, and operations departments of their dismissal on the 21st. The exact scale of the layoffs is unknown. Locally, the date of the layoffs has led to the incident being called the '521 Incident.' On local social networking services (SNS) such as Weibo, posts related to the '521 Incident' have recorded millions of views.
The reason the 521 Incident attracted public attention is due to the unclear dismissal process. Local media reported that some employees of the company were either not given clear reasons for their dismissal or were suddenly laid off after suffering from overwork ahead of the 618 Festival (JD.com's consumer event). One employee told local media in an interview, "I worked overtime until 1 a.m. and was preparing for work the next day when I was dismissed," adding, "I was not informed of any clear reasons or criteria for the dismissal."
Recently, JD.com has also been strictly monitoring employees' work attitudes. The proposed adjustment to JD.com's work rules reportedly includes various provisions such as daily attendance checks for all employees in the morning, checking internal messenger usage, and reviewing internet access records. Particularly criticized locally is the regulation to shorten lunch breaks. Typically, Chinese companies or schools have lunch breaks of at least two hours, but JD.com decided to cut the lunch break in half from two hours to one hour, citing it as a hindrance to productivity. Additionally, to prevent employees from taking naps during lunch, turning off office lights has also been prohibited.
The reason JD.com is undertaking a comprehensive internal cultural overhaul despite strong criticism and backlash both inside and outside the company appears to be due to rapidly deteriorating recent performance. JD.com's revenue growth rate in the first quarter of this year was 17.2%, a severe decline compared to more than triple growth in the same period last year. To make matters worse, its U.S. stock price has fallen by half over the past three years. Founded in 1998, JD.com was listed on the NASDAQ in the U.S. in 2014. JD.com's founder Liu Changdong married Zhang Zetian, a Tsinghua University graduate 19 years his junior and known domestically as the 'Milk Tea Girl,' in 2015. At the time of their marriage, Liu Changdong's fortune was about 53 billion yuan (approximately 9 trillion won), ranking him 9th among Chinese billionaires according to Forbes.
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