Long work hours are quite the norm in Hong Kong. As a study conducted by the Swiss banking group UBS revealed in May, Hong Kong employees often work up to 50.1 hours a week - the longest among the 71 cities surveyed and 38 percent more than the global average of 36 hours and 23 minutes.

Proposals to set standard working hours, or limits on maximum weekly working hours, have generated debates. Meetings held with the hope of arriving at a consensus ended indecisively. The labor representatives staged a walkout, in protest against the employers' proposal of "allowing working hours to be determined individually by contractual agreements between employers and employees".

The stalemate continues. Exhausted from working long days, people look to catch up on lost sleep, finding a place to rest their heads on in the unlikeliest of locations.

The China Daily photo team went out in search of exhausted workers, trying to squeeze in a quick snooze in the middle of a busy day. They found vendors in wet markets sleeping on flattened cardboard boxes on the roof of the iron-grill cubicles from which they sell their ware. Construction workers, who with those who work in catering and sanitation spend the longest time at their jobs, were captured lying on the cement floor of a corridor, some of them using a hand to cover the eyes from the sunlight.

A white-collar employee was photographed sleeping on a green patch in a park, enjoying the breeze. Another person seemed to lack the strength of stepping out the building she worked in, and lay down on the landing. Restaurant employees went for the obvious dining table, when there was no business to attend to, or just settled for the back alley, resting one's tired head on the knees.

Looks like even a 10-minute nap counts for Hong Kong's overworked workers.

willa@chinadailyhk.com

A man who works in the kitchen of a Causeway Bay diner finds room for a quick snooze in a back alley.

Vendors in a wet market in Sham Shui Po find a place to rest their tired heads on the roof of the stalls they do business from.

Construction workers building the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link lie down for a bit in a subway in Jordan, post-lunch.

(HK Edition 11/21/2016 page8)