The 19th Session of the 11th National People’s Congress last week revised the criminal code to make it a crime for a company to intentionally withhold employee wages. A company that does this is subject to criminal fines and the responsible individuals are subject to imprisonment for up to seven years.
This is a significant issue and my law firm’s China employment lawyers are not surprised by this law change.
We are frequently contacted by owners of China WFOEs experiencing financial difficulties. Very often the owner/manager reports their company is behind on paying wages. Our advice always is to deal with the wage issue immediately because local officials will not allow a company to liquidate or restructure when wages are outstanding.
Now, our advice on wages is even more critical.
If you do not pay your employees their wages, you, as the manager/owner, can be charged with a crime and you could face seven years in a Chinese jail. Note also that this law change has retroactive effect. That is, if you failed to pay employees before the law was passed and that failure to pay continues, you are subject to criminal prosecution.
The new legislation is as follows:
1. Article 276(1) of China’s Criminal Code is revised to provide that willful withholding of employee wages is a crime. The elements of the crime are as follows:
a. The company has the means with which to pay the wages.
b. The company willfully withholds payment of wages by either refusing to pay or by intentionally transferring assets to escape liability for payment.
c. The situation is serious or the effects are severe.
2. The company is subject to fine. Persons within the company directly responsible are subject to fine and imprisonment. Imprisonment is up to three years where the situation is serious and up to 7 years where the effects are severe.
There are several points that are not clear:
- How does a company demonstrate that it does not have the means to pay? A simple statement will not work. In the opinion of both our China employment lawyers and our China business lawyers, the only way to ensure there is clearly no means to pay is to file for a formal petition in bankruptcy or to go through the complex economic based layoff system prescribed by the Labor Contract Law.
- Who is directly responsible? For a normal WFOE, this will certainly include the general manager and the Representative Director. It will also likely include accounting or related personnel if they are actually responsible for making the wage payment decision. This almost certainly means this applies to the foreign Representative Director, even if that person is based outside of China and is not involved in day to day decision making.
You cannot rely on these possible defenses to liability. You must take payment of China employee wages seriously. You do not want to be in the position of making a defense after you have been arrested for a serious crime. Chinese employees have become aggressive in ensuring their foreign employers pay their wages. This criminal law weapon will be added to the employee arsenal and we expect this weapon will be used aggressively.
In the past, we stressed to our clients that if they were not going to pay their Chinese employees, they should leave China before anyone realizes this might happen as we are aware of a number of hostage situations involving non-payment of debts. We will now be telling them that if they stay in China or seek to return to China at some later date, they run the additional risk of going to the big house for a long time.
