The “China Law Blog” compared China’s employment laws to those of the United States. Reading this post was a revelation, because I did not know that Chinese workers had more job protection than U.S. workers did. I wondered how this came about.
The reason came about due to the transition from state controlled to private owned businesses. Since 1978, when China implemented its open-door policy, the country went from no privately owned small businesses to more than 10 million small to medium-sized private enterprises that represent about 90 percent of all businesses.
Waiting for a bus after a day’s work.
Prior to this transition, state workers didn’t have to worry about a job. Once the transition began, significant numbers of workers started losing jobs. Since China’s constitution says the government’s role is to serve the people, the government changed the laws to make it more difficult to fire a worker offering better job protection.
“China’s employment law system is quite different from the U.S. The main difference is that the U.S. is an employment at will system, which means you can terminate employees at any time for pretty much any reason. China’s system is the opposite. The Chinese system is a contract employment system. … An employee can only be terminated for cause and cause must be clearly proved. … This whole situation makes the employment relationship and the employment documents much more adversarial than is customary in the U.S.” Source: China Law Blog
Discover China’s Health Care During Mao’s Time
_______________
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
Subscribe to “iLook China”!
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.
iLook China 
Useful information. Lucky me I found your website by accident, and I am surprised why this twist of fate did not came about in advance! I bookmarked it.
Thank you.
[…] What is the difference between China’s labor laws and United […]
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Lloyd Lofthouse. Lloyd Lofthouse said: China's Labor Laws: http://wp.me/pN4pY-uh […]