When ByteDance moved to end its fortnightly six-day rota in 2021, a large share of its own staff objected rather than celebrated, because as much as a fifth of their pay was classed as overtime

A company scraps a schedule that forced its people to work an extra Sunday every other week, handing them back roughly 20 days a year. You would expect relief, maybe applause. Instead, a big share of the workforce pushed back.

That is close to what happened at ByteDance, the Chinese firm behind TikTok and Douyin, in the summer of 2021.

Why would workers fight to keep hours that most labor campaigners were trying to abolish?

The short answer is money. The longer answer says something about how the structure of a paycheck quietly changes what people want.

What ‘big week, small week’ actually was

ByteDance ran a schedule its staff called “big week, small week.” Employees switched between a normal five-day week and a six-day week, working an extra Sunday every other weekend.

In early July 2021, the company said it would end the arrangement from August. But the detail that matters: those extra Sundays, and that overtime made up as much as 20% of some employees’ salaries.

That is not a rounding error. It is a fifth of income, earned reliably, every other week. For some staff the amounts were large in plain terms too. Caixin reported that some ByteDance research and development staff could earn as much as 6,000 yuan, about $930, for a single Sunday under the double-pay system.

Over a year, the rota added roughly 20 extra working days compared with a standard five-day week, and those days were paid at premium rates.

Why ending it felt like a pay cut

When the Sundays went, so did the double pay attached to them. Caixin reported that ByteDance employees’ August paychecks were around 20% lower than in previous months; another report put the average decline at about 17%.

The pushback showed up before the change even landed. According to Caixin, “about a third of ByteDance workers said they opposed cancellation of the Sunday overtime policy because of the pay cuts.” That figure comes from Caixin’s report of an internal survey, not an official company number, so we would read it as a strong signal rather than a precise count. But it seems many did not want the shorter week if it meant a lighter wallet.

The same summer of reversals across Chinese tech

ByteDance was not acting alone. Chinese tech was pulling back from overwork through mid-2021. Rival short-video firm Kuaishou got there first, announcing on June 24, 2021 that it would formally abandon the big/small weeks policy.

Then the state stepped in. In late August 2021, China’s Supreme People’s Court and Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security jointly declared the “996” schedule, nine in the morning to nine at night, six days a week, a violation of labor law, and released ten model cases addressing overtime disputes. As the authorities put it, “Workers are entitled to remuneration, rest and the right to take leave, and it is the legal obligation of employers to comply with the national working hours system.”

What the objection reveals about wage design

The objection was not really about loving Sundays at the office. It was about how the pay had been assembled in the first place.

Firms may respond to changes in standard hours or overtime rules by adjusting hourly wages and overtime hours to preserve a given package of hours and earnings. At ByteDance, no offsetting increase prevented the loss of Sunday overtime from appearing directly in employees’ paychecks.

Our read of the ByteDance survey is this: when overtime stops being an occasional top-up and becomes a fifth of your regular income, a policy that looks like a gift to work-life balance instead feels like a cut to your standard of living.

A shorter week that left people financially whole would have required compensation elsewhere. Without that adjustment, the workers who objected were not necessarily defending overwork. They were defending income they had grown accustomed to earning on a Sunday.