An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Americans addicted to Amazon could soon be wooed by a Chinese tech giant most of them have never heard of. Pinduoduo is planning to expand its reach to the US next month, according to reports in Bloomberg and Reuters. The company is known for delivering goods at rock-bottom prices -- while putting its employees through conditions that a prominent labor activist says should horrify Americans. Described by its founder, the former Google employee Colin Huang, as a cross between "Costco and Disneyland," Pinduoduo has ridden a wave of meteoric Chinese tech growth to become one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world since its founding in 2015. Pinduoduo targeted China's smaller cities and more rural areas, where consumers tend to be less wealthy and more cost-conscious, says JS Tan, an MIT graduate student who researches the Chinese tech industry. Its signature feature is "group buying," which allows users to organize people to make mass purchases directly from manufacturers at a steep discount. Because Pinduoduo is heavily integrated with WeChat, China's top social media platform, it's a snap for users to gather up friends, family and internet strangers to order big batches of everything from electronics to baby formula to groceries -- something that became a lifeline during China's strict Covid lockdowns. "Pinduoduo is known for its extreme overtime," said Li Qiang, a veteran labor activist and founder of the non-profit China Labor Watch. "The competition is extremely intense, and the conditions are much crueler than in America." Two Pinduoduo employees died within a two-week period from December 2020 to January 2021, igniting a national scandal. The first worker, 22-year-old Zhang Fei, died on 29 December, when she was heading home around 1.30am after a series of extremely long shifts. The second worker, an engineer in his 20s, jumped to his death on 9 January after abruptly asking for leave from the company and traveling home the same day. The controversy grew when days later, a Pinduoduo employee who called himself Wang Taixu said he had been fired by the company after posting a photo of a colleague being taken into an ambulance after collapsing. Wang subsequently published a lengthy video on the video-sharing site Bilibili detailing labor abuses he had witnessed at the company; he alleged that some workers were made to work as many as 380 hours a month, which the company denied. "I think that for American tech workers, this definitely isn't a good thing," said Li. "In terms of manufacturing costs, American companies have no way to compete with Pinduoduo. If Pinduoduo succeeds, it could take Chinese-style labor practices and bring them to America."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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