A court has ordered a tech company to pay one of its staff 30,000 yuan (£3,500) in overtime for answering hundreds of work messages outside of office hours.
The woman, known only by her family name of Li, sued for compensation after spending some 500 hours of her free time, including while she was on holiday, answering work-related messages on WeChat, the Chinese equivalent of WhatsApp.
She provided documents detailing her message history, work schedules, as well as a holiday work schedule, to show she was constantly being asked to work even though she was on her own time.
Her bosses argued, in vain, that the work did not qualify for overtime because staff only needed to reply to “occasional questions” from clients.
The ruling
