Behind the dances and fun of the trendy social network, TikTok, there is a dark work reality characterized by the obsession with productivity and the lack of consideration for breaks and the personal life of employees, according to an investigation carried out by the Wall Street Journal. Bad labor practices that former workers interviewed by the American newspaper say have increased as the popularity of the platform has increased.
toxic practices. Among these bad practices are the obligation to attend meetings between teams from China and the United States during Chinese time, which forces North American workers to work at night or on weekends, the imposition of exaggerated and unjustified deadlines or competition between multiple groups on the same project to encourage speed, which increases stress and frustration.
In addition, several former employees say that they could have, on average, 85 hours of meetings a week, which forced them to carry out their tasks outside of working hours, generally on weekends or at night. In other cases, working late at night is an imposition from bosses to meet deadlines.
Dire consequences for professionals. These bad practices have led some employees to have eating disorders, insomnia, stress levels and emotional discomfort of such magnitude that they have had to go to therapy to try to manage them.
And to situations as unpleasant as that of a worker who had so many meetings in a row without being able to get up from the chair that her pants were soaked in blood, since she was not allowed to get up to put on a compress. Or that of another professional who claims that she had to present a medical certificate showing a potentially serious illness so that her boss would allow her to stop working night after night. Some also point out family and sentimental problems due to excessive work pressure.
Exacerbated competitiveness. Another practice contributing to employee discomfort is TikTok’s practice of putting multiple teams to work on the same project separately, each developing their own ideas and products independently, which former employees say they seek encourage competition between them to speed up the process.
A practice that several employees say contributes to greatly increasing stress and entails enormous frustration, because there are people who work for months on a project but never see their results implemented on the social network because they weren’t the first to arrive.
Chinese by default. Another recurring complaint is the use of Chinese in meetings where there are people who do not speak the language (who are offered, yes, simultaneous translation) or in important internal documents that are poorly translated into English with software.
The complaints about the language have been so many that those responsible for the company agreed in November 2021, given the massive resignations that the company was experiencing, to hold the meetings in English if any of the participants did not speak Chinese.
The high pressure of technology. TikTok is not the only company that has been accused of bad labor practices in order to improve the company’s results. Other technology companies, such as Amazon or Tesla, have also been involved in some similar controversies. In the case of e-commerce, because of productivity software that penalized even going to the bathroom and that put so much pressure on employees that it caused repetitive stress injuries.
Tesla leaders, for their part, were accused by some employees of forcing their employees to have marathon working hours and of requiring them to put their jobs before their personal lives in order to meet the objectives set on time.
Image | Jonas Leupe
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism