Young staff work overtime at night in the office. Photo: VCG
A Shanghai firm found itself in a storm of criticism on Monday afternoon for its decision to fire one of its employees who took an unapproved 8-day leave to handle his father’s funeral arrangements. Netizens slammed its cold-blooded implementation of attendance policies and lack of basic sympathy.
The case was made public by the Shandong High People’s Court on Sunday on its WeChat public account. It became one of the main topics on microblogging platform Sina Weibo on Monday, with some 440 million views and more than 110,000 comments as of press time.
Lu Yunsheng, who worked with a housing management firm in Shanghai, applied to take an eight-day leave from January 6 to 13 in 2020, to see his father who was sick. He then learned on January 7, 2020 that his father had passed away so Lu went to handle his father’s funeral arrangements until January 13, 2020.
Lu returned to his office in Shanghai on January 14, 2020. But the firm terminated his employment, effective from January 31, 2020, saying Lu had been absent for more than three days. It also declined to provide any compensation for firing him.
Lu’s company considered his application for leave to be invalid as the company’s boss did not give his approval, even though Lu’s department supervisor had approved the application. According to the company’s attendance policy, leave of longer than three days can only be approved by the CEO.
On March 27, 2020, Lu took the case to the arbitration authorities, and demanded compensation of 104,000 yuan ($16,058) for illegal termination of his labor contract. The arbitration commission ruled that the company should pay Lu 75,269 yuan.
The Shanghai firm refused to obey and filed a lawsuit.
The court of first instance ruled that the company implemented the rules improperly and failed to show sympathy and respect to the employee’s reasonable request. The court ordered the company to pay the compensation of 75,269 yuan to Lu. The court also said that the firm’s CEO did not execute the right of approval in time, which led to Lu’s absence on January 6, 2020.
The company refused to obey the court’s decision, and proceeded to a higher court.
However, the court of second instance also agreed with the first court’s ruling.
Many netizens said they could relate to Lu and said the company was too cold-blooded to show no sympathy.
Global Times
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