Recently, a netizen posted that a company in Wuhan issued a notice of punishment because employees did not submit their “Chairman’s Summary Speech” reflections with the required 800-1000 words, and employees exceeding or falling short of the word count were penalized at a rate of 5 yuan per word. In the punishment notice, a total of 381 employees were fined for not meeting the word count requirement; one employee was fined 6,990 yuan for exceeding the word count by 1,398 words, and another employee was fined 1,710 yuan for having 342 words of repeated content with other employees. The notice finally pretended to be magnanimous, stating that, based on the principle of “education first, punishment as a warning,” those involved would receive “light punishment,” with any excess amount over 200 yuan uniformly fined at 200 yuan, deducted from the wages of the employees by the Group’s Human Resources Management Center starting from February 2025. This kind of extortion naturally aroused public opposition, but the company’s staff claimed, “The enterprise has rules and regulations; violations will be punished. The company’s original intention is not to make everyone spend too much effort on writing; writing two or three thousand words is a waste of time.”
It is obvious that the so-called “education” is just an excuse for capitalists to train obedient servants, and the so-called “light punishment” is merely empty talk. If fines of 5 yuan per word were enforced, it would further incite resistance among the people; the “penalty deduction” in the Labor Law, which states that “deductions from wages must not exceed 20%,” is a result of proletarian struggle. On February 11, the Wuhan Economic Development Zone Labor and Social Security Inspection Team, upon receiving a complaint call from the employee’s family, stated after communication with Tianyuan Environmental Protection Company, “Because it has not yet actually deducted the fine, it is not a settled fact; we can only communicate with them. If fines are really imposed later, we will handle it according to law and regulations.”
Mainstream media, in order to maintain the ruling bourgeoisie’s dominance, also criticized lightly, saying that enterprises cannot “pat themselves on the back” and decide arbitrarily, calling for the government to strengthen supervision and attempting to lead the masses astray into reformism. But harsh fines on employees are not occasional acts by individual capitalists; they are the result of the bourgeoisie controlling the means of production. Coincidentally, on the same day, February 11, a machinery manufacturing company in Guangdong, claiming to care about employees’ health, introduced the “Toilet Management Norm,” dividing toilet time into six periods, requiring employees to finish within that time or face a 100 yuan fine. The system was not passed after mass protests, but bourgeois media simultaneously defended other brutal fine systems, such as “only allowing one bathroom visit per shift,” with violators fined 20 yuan. The news even claimed, “This is mainly to prevent employees from slacking off or loafing; after all, a trip to the toilet takes one or two hours. Doesn’t the company then have to pay for a ‘big boss’?” In fact, this is just an excuse to intensify exploitation of workers, as the current Zhongxiu factory often works 996 hours or even has no rest days per month, and the surplus value plundered far exceeds what can be generated in half an hour to an hour of toilet time. As Lenin pointed out, “The purpose of fines is not to compensate for losses but to establish discipline.”
It is evident that although Zhongxiu nominally abolished regulations granting the enterprise the authority to impose fines, only stipulating that companies can hold employees legally responsible when they cause economic losses to the unit, it did not grant the employer the power to arbitrarily fine employees. However, laws are tools of the ruling class, and Zhongxiu’s so-called lawful and regulated handling still serves bourgeois interests. Depending on the local class struggle situation, it is often claimed that “fines are an internal management tool” and thus not illegal. Moreover, the bourgeoisie can still covertly fine employees through deductions from performance wages, such as Meituan, which had to announce the abolition of overtime fines by the end of 2025 after strikes by delivery workers, replacing fines with points deductions, and adjusting delivery prices based on scores—still a form of covert fines. To truly abolish the bourgeoisie’s savage fine system, the masses must unite and struggle to overthrow Zhongxiu’s reactionary rule.
