From Uniqlo to a Battery Giant, Toilet Breaks Become China's Latest Labor Flashpoint
A former Uniqlo employee's claim that staff get five-minute toilet breaks timed over walkie-talkie landed the same week a battery-factory worker's meltdown went viral — and Chinese workers are reading both as one story about dignity on the clock.
Two stories about going to the toilet at work trended in China this week — one from a clothing store, one from a battery factory — and Chinese workers read them as a single statement about what their time is worth.
The first was a claim posted by a former Uniqlo employee: that staff at the Japanese fast-fashion chain's Chinese stores are allowed five minutes for a toilet break, and must report leaving the sales floor over a walkie-talkie. The screenshot spread under the hashtag "Uniqlo: only five minutes for the toilet" (优衣库 上厕所只给5分钟) and drew out a stream of current and former retail workers. "Only five minutes for the toilet at Uniqlo? Hearing that, I'm already exhausted," one poster wrote, adding that the lightest jobs in a store were said to be the three hours of onboarding training and the single hour of counting the till. Others asked the practical follow-up: what happens if you run over.
The second story had already been circling for two days. On September 9 a video spread showing a factory worker, reportedly denied permission to leave the line, losing control and stripping off inside a workshop; early posts placed it at CATL's Yibin base, and the battery giant quickly denied it. On September 10, rival cell maker REPT Battero confirmed the video came from its own Jiashan plant in Zhejiang. Its statement said the worker had resigned and asked for the paperwork to be settled immediately, that processing takes time, and that he lost control and "made an extreme behavior" after the two sides disagreed — while denying that the company restricts toilet use, and apologizing to CATL for the misattribution. Police were present when the matter was resolved that day, the company said, and it has reported the video's spread to the authorities. On Zhihu, the episode drew roughly 1.45 million views of hot-list debate.
What made the pair resonate is that they read as one continuum. The Weibo post that carried the Uniqlo screenshot into the trending list put it bluntly: its author wrote that she "especially admires" the factory worker who broke down, because his outburst was at least visible — unlike the quiet accumulation of a shift where the bladder never comes first. Beneath it, the top comment ran: "A Chinese person's life: hold your pee in school, hold your pee at work, and when you're old, you can't hold it" — under a thread titled "the vertical life of Chinese people." Retail and factory work in China is often shift-managed to the minute, and toilet time has become a recurring symbol in that argument: the last unmanaged minutes of an otherwise measured day.
Uniqlo has not addressed the claim in the coverage that trended, and the posts remain workers' claims rather than confirmed policy. But the direction of the conversation was unmistakable, as one commenter put it: "I thought work would give me some toilet freedom. Work is the same."