Everyone Else Is Grinding, While I Take Weekends Off

Orders have been cut in half, and the auto-parts factory has only enough cash on hand to pay two months of wages. Yet the owner posts a notice at the factory gate: "Our factory will have a five-day workweek, with no reduction in pay." The entire workforce calls him crazy, competitors wait for him to go bankrupt, and netizens laugh that he's giving up completely. He Chi is betting on the real case of Ford's 1926 five-day workweek, when productivity actually rose. On the day the month-long trial ends, the figures come in: the defect-free rate has jumped from 94.7% to 99.2%, turnover has fallen to zero, and output has risen instead of fallen. The trending topics across the internet change direction. Thirty-one factories and more than nine thousand workers join him to form a Slow Work Alliance. But success invites trouble. A traffic wrangler who makes a living stoking conflict sets his sights on He Chi: a scheme to use marriage to offload debt, a daughter subjected to online abuse, and a female lawyer smeared as a gold digger. He doesn't talk back. He brings out the books, the evidence, and the court. Five years later, taking it slow has become a shared belief across Jiangcheng. This is for everyone who doesn't want to be caught in the rat race, and can't keep up with it anyway.