Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Seven Myths About China Employer Rules and Regulations (aka Employee Handbook)

China employment lawyerEvery China employer should have a set of rules and regulations setting out employee and its employer duties and obligations. This document should cover all types of employees, including part-time employees. It also should at minimum, cover the following:

Many foreign employers wrongly assume that whatever they use in their home country is good enough for their China employee manual. This is virtually never true as the reason for having employee manuals is so different as between China and Western countries. Western companies often learn too late about these differences when one of their employees leaves or is terminated.

The following are seven common myths our China lawyers often hear about China employer rules and regulations:

Myth 1: It need not be in Chinese. Though having your rules and regulations entirely in English will not necessarily invalidate the entire document (this depends on where you are), it needs to be in Chinese so your employees can understand it. If you do not have a Chinese language version of your rules and regulations, you run the risk of a Chinese court finding it not binding on your employees because they could not understand it and you didn’t bother explaining it to them. Also, the local labor authorities may require a Chinese translation for audit purposes and you don’t want to be caught flat-footed when that happens. And whatever you do, do not just take your English language version and pay a translator to put it into Chinese. Your Chinese language rules and regulations are what the courts will be looking at to determine whether you acted properly or not, so you want that document to be written clearly (and in Chinese) for this purpose.

Myth 2: It need not be in English. You really should have an English translation done and make sure that too is good. You as the employer will need to refer to this document in making employee decisions (especially termination decisions). Unless all of your people who will be making these decisions are fluent in written Chinese, you need a well-written English version to serve as your roadmap on how to handle all sorts of decisions regarding your employees.

Myth 3: It need not be updated because it has a provision that says the outdated sections will automatically be replaced and superseded by then-current laws. Wrong. Both nationally and at the local level, China’s employment laws are constantly changing. It

Seven Myths About China Employer Rules and Regulations (aka Employee Handbook)

No comments:

Post a Comment