Компанія з Китаю змушувала інженера відвідувати онлайн-тренінги поза роботою / Depositphotos
An employee of an engineering company in Beijing has won justice in a court that fined his ex-employer for forcing him to attend online training outside of working hours.
The engineer, called Wang in the Chinese media, started working for the company in July 2020 and quit three years later. The reason was a disagreement with his employer, who forced him to attend online training after work hours on apps such as Ding Ding and WeChat. If the employee refused to attend the training, the company demanded a “voluntary donation” of 200 yuan (about $20) as compensation.
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Eventually, Vaughn filed a lawsuit, demanding about $11,000 in overtime compensation from his former employer. As evidence to support his claim, he provided screenshots of his participation in online training and recordings of chats with colleagues.
The company, in turn, denied that these online trainings should be classified as overtime and claimed that employees were only required to log in to these online sessions — with no obligation to speak or even listen to the content. Whereas the “donation” policy allegedly had nothing to do with these training events.
In the end, the Beijing No. 2 People’s Court sided with Wang.
“These actions took place after working hours, and the employee had no opportunity to refuse to participate. Therefore, they should be qualified as overtime work,” the judge said in his statement.
However, the court clarified that Wang had attended the training several times much later than the start of the training, so it set the compensation at 19,000 yuan (over $2.6 thousand).
Many local media outlets supported the decision, emphasizing that employers’ interference in employees’ personal lives is becoming an increasingly common problem.
“With the development of communication tools, the interference of work in the personal life of employees is becoming more and more common. Even when they are not physically present in the office or officially off duty, a notification on a mobile device can bring them back to work. This forces employees to be online all the time, which is an exploitation of their time. This form of hidden overtime work should not be ignored by the law,” reads a commentary on gmw.cn, a news portal controlled by the central government.
Earlier, ITC told the story of an engineer who Worked in a startup from prison for 6 months and got promoted, as well as about AI startup bosses who accidentally discovered that hired the same IT specialist from India (he worked in 4 at the same time).
Source: SCMP
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