China Employment Law Webinar: What HR Needs to Know

Our lead China employment lawyer, Grace Yang, will be leading a 90 minute webinar on what HR departments need to know about China employment law, and boy is that a lot. Go here to sign up.

It’s been about ten years since China enacted its “new” labor law and it is flat-out unbelievable how much has changed since then. I can remember how controversial it was back then when we first started writing about it. Way back in September, 2008, I wrote a post, entitled, China’s Brand New Labor Law Regulations. It’s All Here. I remember well getting an e-mail from a client (no less) angry at me for even writing about it. His argument was something along the lines that by my even writing about it as though it “might” be followed was a “wasteful joke” because all it would do is cause “paranoid” foreign companies to abide by the law and further damage their ability to compete against their China company peers.

My response was that we believed China would relatively quickly start enforcing its employment laws and would initially do so especially as against foreign companies. That was our theme from day one and many were unhappy about it. Emails poured in from people claiming we were writing about China’s employment laws just to gin up work for ourselves and it was ridiculous to believe China would ever enforce them and either we knew that and were trying to rip people off or we were just plain stupid. My response was always the same. I would emphasize that there were a lot of social and economic reasons for these laws and we fervently believed they would be enforced, though likely slowly and over time. I would then talk about how important it is for foreign companies to abide by Chinese laws.

I told you so!

Today (and probably for the last five years at least), virtually nobody operating in China is not mindful of its employment laws and, blissfully, I don’t think we’ve gotten any hate mail on such laws for nearly a decade. And our China employment law practice is booming.

In the early days of China’s employment laws, we divided the work among our team of China lawyers, but as enforcement of the employment laws increased and as the rules surrounding those laws proliferated and became highly localized, it became apparent we needed a lawyer who would focus on China employment law. See China Employment Law: Local and Not So Simple. Grace Yang is that lawyer for us. Grace has law degrees from top law schools in China and the United States and last year she wrote THE book on China employment law: The China Employment Law Guide: What You Need to Know to Protect Your Company. Buy it! 

Our China employment work these days consists mostly of the following:

1. Helping foreign companies with employees in China avoid employment law problems, either from the Chinese government or from their own employees. In large part, Grace does this by performing employer audits and then remedying the mistakes found. See China Employment Compliance and Audits: THE New Big Thing.
2. Helping foreign companies that come to us with a specific and usually urgent employee problem. These problems can range from fending off a lawsuit or a regulator to figuring out what to do with a bunch of employees that will be brought on via a merger deal or will be terminated due to an office or company shut-down.
3. Helping expats negotiate enforceable contracts with their China employer.

About a third of our China employment law work comes from lawyers, about a third comes from HR professionals and about a third comes from company owners/managers and employees.

Now about this upcoming China employment law webinar. It’s going to be on Tuesday, October 23 at 1 p.m. Eastern Time and it has been approved for 1.5 general recertification credit hours toward PHR, SPHR, and GPHR recertification through the HR Certification Institute. It also will get you 1.5 PDCs for the SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP.

It will be geared towards “HR, in-house counsel, financial officers, and company presidents.”

It is being put on by HR Webinar Company and they describe it 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 devolve into a dispute. It is therefore imperative that you understand the framework of China employment law and steps you can take to mitigate risk.

If you have China employees, you really do not want to miss Grace’s upcoming webinar.

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.