Video footage shows employees at a Chinese beauty company crawling along the street on their hands and knees after failing to meet targets.
Pedestrians in Tengzhou, in the eastern Shandong province, are seen looking on in astonishment as half a dozen female workers and one man crawl along the street, led by a man carrying a flag bearing the company’s name.
The firm reportedly sells beauty products, and the unfortunate employees had failed to meet their end-of-year sales targets, according to local news website DZWWW.
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The crawl came to an end when police intervened.
One of the women who participated in the punishment told local media that she did so voluntarily as “self-discipline” for failing to meet her targets, and said the other crawlers consisted of the company’s owners and other senior managers rather than junior employees.
Nonetheless, the footage quickly went viral, provoking a “hot discussion” online. Many commenters lambasted the firm’s bosses for the humiliating stunt, but others “targeted the employees for silently accepting such kind of behaviour”, says India Today.
Local authorities said the company has been temporarily closed for “rectification”, Yahoo reports.
English-language Chinese news and culture website Shanghai-ist notes that this is far from the first workplace punishment to go viral in China.
Similar scandals have seen displeased bosses “slap or spank workers, as well as making them eat live mealworms, choke down bitter gourd, or drink toilet water for coming up with sub-par results”.
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