"My team? Every one of them has solid credentials and real experience. And their annual salary is less than a fifth of what a new grad makes elsewhere." I leaned forward. "You call that high wages?"
I pulled up the attendance records.
"Fine. You're worried about internal harmony? Let's look at hourly rates."
"There were two hundred forty-eight official workdays in 2025. Our department averaged three hundred fifty days on-site. During the Mid-Autumn Festival, while everyone else was home with their families, we were rolling out a new system. We slept in the office."
"Out of those three hundred fifty days, the earliest anyone clocked out was eight p.m. The latest?" I paused. "There was no latest. We pulled all-nighters for a hundred of those days. Our actual logged hours hit five thousand nine hundred."
"At seventy-two thousand a year, that's twelve dollars an hour."
I let that sit for a moment, then spoke slowly, each word deliberate.
"Twelve dollars. In this city, bubble tea shops pay twenty-two."
"The company provides dinner and late-night meals when you work overtime. No one's mistreating you—"