Seminar on China’s Employment Law Landscape: Seattle, December 7

Our lead China employment lawyer, Grace Yang, will be speaking at a Washington State Bar Association (WSBA) seminar in Seattle this Thursday, December 7. If you are in Seattle and doing business in China or even just thinking about doing business in China, I cannot urge you strongly enough to attend.

The full name of the talk is China’s Employment Law Landscape: What You Need to Know. And trust me when I say there is probably a lot you need to know. I say this because foreign companies doing business in China seem to get employment and labor law issues wrong maybe more than anything else. And, frankly, I don’t blame them. Until Grace joined our law firm, none of our China lawyers would touch most China employment law matters because none believed themselves qualified to do so. We were of the view that only lawyers who focus their practices on China employment and labor law should be touching such matters. The reason for this is simply because China’s employment rules and laws are highly localized and always changing and, most importantly, oftentimes unwritten. The unwritten part means that having a good relationship with the local labor and employment bureaus is absolutely key. See China Employment Law: Local and Not So Simple.

Grace has become our go-to person on everything related to China employment law. She splits her time between Beijing where she grew up and attended Beijing University Law School and Seattle — Grace has her J.D. law degree from the University of Washington. Grace recently wrote and had published (just a couple of months ago) what would best be described as a handbook on China employment law. The book is titled, The China Employment Law Guide: What You Need to Know to Protect Your Company and you can get it in either paperback or in a digital format. I always recommend you get the paperback version because it is the sort of book you want on your shelf for quick access whenever you have a China employment law issue and so you can easily share it among your HR team and your managers. Go here to Amazon to get your own. 

Grace’s talk will go from noon on Thursday until 1:30 p.m. and it will be at 600 Stewart Street, Suite 205 in downtown Seattle. To register in advance, go here, or show up at the event starting at 11:30 a.m. You will get 1.5 hours CLE credit for attending. The WSBA describes Grace’s talk as follows:

China’s employment laws are complicated and highly local. Foreign companies doing business in China face complex China labor and employment issues and questions every day – often without even realizing it. What works in the United States has very little in common with what works in China. Employment compliance has become one of the most important issues foreign companies face in China and it is the rare foreign company that gets it right. Employee disputes are becoming considerably more common and government enforcement is getting significantly more stringent. It virtually always costs less for your company to deal proactively with China employment law issues than to wait to address them only after they have come a dispute. As such, it is imperative that you understand the framework of Chinese employment law and steps you can take to mitigate risk.

At the beginning of this post, I said that if you are doing business in China or thinking of doing business in China you should attend this talk. I am sure this caused at least some of you to think that your attendance is not necessary unless you actually have employees in China. Wrong. As is mentioned in the seminar description in the proceeding paragraph, “foreign companies doing business in China face complex China labor and employment issues….every day — often without realizing it. Pretty much every month for the past five years some foreign company has called one of our China lawyers with an employment problem that arose because they did not realize they had an employee in  China. See Doing Business in China with Deportation or Worse Hanging Over Your Head to see what I am talking about.

More importantly, there has not been a single month in the last five years when some company has not come to us after having made a China employment law mistake. Because there are so many laws and rules (both national and local) and because China so heavily favors employees over foreign employers, the smallest and most technical mistakes can be game changers. Put simply: you have to get China’s employment laws exactly right but very few do.

I recently heard Grace give a similar talk as part of a webinar and it was fantastic (and the reviews from listeners supports me on this) and essential. If you practice labor or employment law, if you are interested in labor or employment law, if you have any interest in China or anything at all to do with China, I urge you to attend. And if you will not be in town — heck, even if you will be in town), I  also urge you to buy the book.

So just sign up here and go. We’ll see you there.

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.