Holidays in China: Nice Work If You Can Get It

In the winter, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of holidays. And vacation. Here in Seattle at China Law Blog world headquarters, we typically close our offices on all key holidays and we often give our staff additional time off around those days as well. But those are choices we have made as a firm, not a legal mandate from the government. Many Americans are surprised to learn that employers are not required to provide any holidays to their employees, let alone overtime or extra pay for working on a holiday. But they shouldn’t be surprised: what could be more American than the freedom to contract?

Things are quite different in China, where the government requires employers to observe the following holidays:

• New Year’s Day: 1 day
• Labor Day: 1 day
• National Day: 3 days
• Spring Festival: 3 days
• Tomb Sweeping Day: 1 day
• Dragon Boat Festival: 1 day
• Mid-Autumn Festival: 1 day
• Women’s Day: ½ day (for female employees only)

Yes, China really does have a national holiday that is only for women.

If you’ve ever been in China during one of the “Golden Week” periods (National Day and Spring Festival), you know that China makes its three-day holidays into seven-day national vacation periods by reshuffling days and requiring employees to work weekend days on either side of the holiday, which often leads to a de facto schedule where employees have to work 12 calendar days in a row. Not surprisingly, employees balk at this, and enough of them extend their one-week official holiday into a longer unofficial holiday that it’s difficult to get much done for a week on either side of a Golden Week.

We regularly advise our American clients to make other plans during these periods, because they’ll only get frustrated if they expect their Chinese counterparts to follow the strict holiday schedule. And you can forget about factories putting out product. The workers are occupied with the largest migration in recorded history, piling onto standing room only trains and creating traffic jams so epic that they almost seem staged as clickbait.

It’s actually pretty nice to be in a big city like Beijing or Shanghai during Golden Week, as long as you don’t want to go to a museum or park or other public space. With a billion people all on vacation at the same time, it’s hard not to think of Yogi Berra’s quote: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”

Many of China’s biggest holidays will be starting soon, so get ready.

The post Holidays in China: Nice Work If You Can Get It appeared first on China Law Blog.

We will be discussing the practical aspects of Chinese law and how it impacts business there. We will be telling you what works and what does not and what you as a businessperson can do to use the law to your advantage. Our aim is to assist businesses already in China or planning to go into China, not to break new ground in legal theory or policy.