How Did These Chinese Workers End Up with a Whole Week of Paid Vacation?

Although their product is billed as the “the party game for horrible people,” the makers of Cards Against Humanity have shown that they really aren’t so bad.

The company, which sells its funny yet sometimes vulgar card game online, often donates sales proceeds to various causes here in the United States. Yet this year, as part of its “Eight Sensible Gifts for Hannukah” promotion, the Chicago-based business did something for its printing company in China: it gave all workers there one week of paid vacation.

According to the company’s blog, their printer didn’t actually have any formal procedure to give employees a paid vacation; in fact, such practices are exceedingly rare in China. Instead, they explained, “we bought 100% of the factory’s capacity and paid them to produce nothing for a week.”

This, in turn, helped the workers spend time with family and friends and pursue personal interests, or else just enjoy the time away from work.

Workers also shared vacation photos and thank you notes with Cards Against Humanity to show how they’d spent their time.

Management at Cards Against Humanity acknowledged that companies and consumers in many parts of the world often rely on exploited labor, and many don’t seem too concerned with the people who make these everyday products.

In other words, while many Americans look forward to an annual visit to Disney World with the family or rent out vacation condos on the beach, workers in other parts of the world may not even be excused from work if they become ill.

The gesture, Cards Against Humanity reps said on the company’s blog, “doesn’t undo the ways that all of us profit from unfair working conditions around the world, but it’s a step in the right direction.”

More than 150,000 customers helped to fund the vacation, while receiving some goodies of their own, in the “Eight Sensible Gifts” promotion.

Some other “sensible” gifts included socks (for the first three days), NPR memberships, and an investment into something called the “Cards Against Humanity US Treasury Inflation Protected Securities Fund.”

Earlier this year, the company also ran its satirical Black Friday sale, during which more than 12,000 customers paid Cards Against Humanity $5 (or more, if they wished) for “nothing.”

The money, over $70,000 total, was then given to their U.S. employees as a “bonus.” Employees used the money to pay for everything from Playstation 4 consoles and iPad Pros to items that can’t be mentioned in a family newspaper; donations to Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, where a deadly shooting had just occurred, and other charities were also common.