This book provides a clear overview of the labor and employment law environment in China and its legal requirements.

The China Employment Law Guide addresses various key China labor and employment issues all employers (especially foreign companies doing business in China) and employees (especially expats seeking a job or working in China) need to address or understand. It provides practical and easy-to-understand answers to China labor and employment questions from hiring through firing and nearly all things in between. For example, it addresses the issues China employers constantly confront on matters ranging from what they need to consider in drafting their employment contracts, what should go into a China-centric employer set of rules and regulations and why such a document is essential at all, how to hire, how to fire, overtime, vacation time, pregnancy leave, probation terms, employee benefits, and even lifetime employment. Perhaps most importantly, it confronts head on the many myths Western companies have about China employment laws and discusses how those myths can cause so many problems. This book consists mostly of blog posts and articles my colleagues and I have authored over the years on our award-winning China Law Blog. We do our best to make these articles (and this book) as concise and readable as possible because to provide our readers with accessible legal and practical answers that work in the real world. Unless absolutely necessary, this means we do not go into the weeds in citing and explaining China's employment rules and regulations, but we instead lay out clear paths forward for dealing with real-life employment law issues and problems. China's labor and employment laws are complex and local and constantly evolving, and so in many cases, we write not so much to provide the right answers for your specific situation, but to arm you with the right questions you must ask to get the right answers.

It’s not easy to find out exactly what you can and can’t do—legally—with the human resources you employ to help run a business in China. That is, unless you have this well informed, insightful, information-packed guide at hand. Although it’s concise and easy to understand, it offers—in clear English-comprehensive, accurate and up-to-date guidance on the best HR practice in China for tackling such crucial (and often tricky) employment issues as: recruitment and induction; the employment contract; benefits, retirement, and tax issues; rules covering expatriate and foreign workers; training and development; industrial relations; dispute resolution; and termination and redundancy. Especially useful in this new edition is its coverage of the recently implemented Labour Contract Law of the PRC, which took effect on 1 January 2008, with its important clarifications in such areas as written contracts and severance pay. Translations of laws, rules, and regulations manifest CCH’s unchallenged standards of accuracy and clarity. Employment Law in China will prove immeasurably valuable to line managers, human resource practitioners, company lawyers and other professionals involved in running day-to-day business operations in China.

This book deals with international labor and employment law in the East Asia Region (EA), particularly dealing with China, South Korea, and Japan. It explores and explains the effects of globalization and discusses the role of international lawyers, business personnel, and human resource directors who are knowledgeable, culturally sensitive, and understand the issues that can arise when dealing in EA trade and investment. The text and readings (from area experts) are organized and written to provide the reader with, first, a broad understanding and insight into the global dimensions of the fast-emerging area of labor and employment issues (e.g., global legal standards and their interplay with domestic and foreign laws); and second, to show how these laws and approaches play out in specific EA countries (comparing global approaches with the specific laws of each country on four common agenda items: regulatory administration, workers' rights, trade unions, and dispute resolution). The book should be of interest not only to lawyers, students, human resource personnel, and government officials, but also to business investors, managers, and members of the public interested in the growing phenomenon of changing labor laws and societies in China, South Korea, and Japan.

Labour law has traditionally aimed to protect the employee under a hierarchy built on constitutional provisions, statutory law, collective agreements at various levels, and the employment contract, in that order. However, in employment regulation in recent years, ‘flexibility’ has come to dominate the world of work – a set of policies that reshuffle the relationship among the fundamental pillars of labour law and inevitably lead to degrading the protection of employees. This book, the first-ever to consider the sources of labour law from a comparative perspective, details the ways in which the traditional hierarchy of sources has been altered, presenting an international view on major cross-cutting issues followed by fifteen country reports. The authors’ analysis of the changing hierarchy of labour law sources in the light of recent trends includes such elements as the following: the constitutional dimension of labour rights; the normative intervention by the State; the regulatory function of collective bargaining and agreements; the hierarchical organization of labour law sources and the ‘principle of favour’; the role played by case law in both common law and civil law countries; the impact of the European Economic Governance; decentralization of collective bargaining; employment conditions as key components of global competitive strategies; statutory schemes that allow employees to sign away their rights. National reports – Australia, Brazil, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States – describe the structure of labour law regulations in each legal system with emphasis on the current state of affairs. The authors, all distinguished labour law scholars in their countries, thus collectively provide a thorough and comprehensive commentary on labour law regulation and recent tendencies in national labour laws in various corners of the globe. With its definitive analysis of such crucial matters as the decentralization of collective bargaining and how individual employment contracts can deviate from collective agreements and statutory law, and its comparison of representative national labour law systems, this highly informative book will prove of inestimable value to all professionals concerned with employment relations, labour disputes, or labour market policy, especially in the context of multinational workforces.

The Labor Law of the People’s Republic of China, originally promulgated in 1994, has undergone many changes and continues to be subject to judgments and arbitral awards arising from disputes and such claims as breaches of labor contract and denial of benefits. This book provides most updated, detailed, and comprehensive interpretation of Chinese labor law issues, focusing on detailed analysis of twenty leading cases. The first part of the book describes in depth the role of labor law in Chinese society, elaborating on its development and its characteristic features. The cases that follow, each described in minute detail, thoroughly explicate the issues that underlie the dynamic growth of Chinese labor law, such as the following: establishment and identification of the employment relationship; performance, change, dissolution, and termination of the employment contract; determining atypical employment relationships; fiduciary duties; health insurance provisions; work-related injury; labor dispatching service; legal remedies—mediation, arbitration, litigation; labor inspection; legal issues on foreigners’ employment in China; violation of rights to privacy, human dignity, and equal employment; enterprise dissolution or merger; employer’s right to dismissal; economic compensations arising from illegal dismissal; and worker’s damages arising from illegal dissolution of the employment contract. The carefully selected cases span the full range of labor law issues, with perspectives from parties to the action, attorneys, and judicial personnel as well as the editor’s expert analysis of the legal principles, statutes, and case law involved. This English translation of a book published in 2016—the first to focus on labor and employment-related issues in China in a comprehensive way via case law—will help the international community to understand China’s labor law environment and its current achievements. It will prove of immeasurable practical value for practitioners, arbitrators, and academics, as well as for employers and workers with an interest in China.

​The primary aim of this book is to help readers understand the development of the theory and practice of labor law in China, and to familiarize them with major advances and remaining challenges in this field. The author also puts forward suggestions on how to improve labor law in China on the basis of an analysis of key problems and comparative study. The book can also serve as a useful guide, allowing HR experts at companies with Chinese employees or doing business in China to better understand Chinese labor law and regulations. It covers a broad range of labor law issues, including the meaning of labor relations, definition of the employee and employer, the duties of employers and employees, anti-discrimination, labor dispatch, minimum wage, termination of labor contracts, work injury insurance, labor inspections and labor dispute resolution.