Legal cases involving foreign workers on the rise
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When 47-year-old Canadian Andrew Fenske came to China in 2004, he was the first and only Western employee leading his Austria-based company's customer service division, and helped build the company's China operation from scratch. He could never have imagined that a back illness in 2009 could cost him his 28-year career and embroil him in a two-year lawsuit.
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Job hunters talk to potential employers at a job fair for foreigners at the Hong Kong Macau Center in Beijing last year. |
He was fired by his company Engel Machinery, the world's largest manufacturer of injection molding machines, for being absent from work for two months without asking for leave. A court in Shanghai rejected his initial appeal for compensation of 1 million yuan (US$ 153,905) for lost salary and allowance. Andrew was one of 201,955 foreign employees working in China, according to the latest census released by the National Bureau of Statistics Friday. That demographic represents about a fifth of the 1.02 million foreign citizens currently living in China.
Growing trend
Andrew's case is by no means an isolated one. According to Wang Huayu, a human resources expert and chief consultant at the Shanghai-based Chi Wan Legal Consulting Firm, the number of legal cases involving foreign workers has increased by 30 percent in the past three years.
According to Wang, there are three main reasons behind this trend. First is the fact that the number of foreign workers has grown. The second comes from the tightening of the Labor Law in 2008 and Social Insurance Law in 2010, prompting workers, including foreign ones, to pay more attention to their legal rights. Finally, where foreigners previously tended to work in high-level management positions, more of them are now working in mid-level management as well as ordinary jobs, such as technicians.
However, the law hasn't quite kept up with these changes. At present, there is only one regulation covering foreign employees in China: the Administration of Foreigners Working in China Provisions published in 1996.
"Overall, this 1996 regulation just lists some basic labor rules that suit all workers without really listing some targeted details for foreign employees. Although the government has always tried to adjust this law, it only made some amendments for Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao expats in 2005," Wang said.
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