Changing jobs often: does it damage a person's credit?
Article 3 of the Labor Law gives workers the right to equal employment and to choose their occupation, and in general an employee may leave by giving thirty days' written notice. The article argues that frequent job changes are a lawful exercise of that right, that tagging every job-seeker as suspect in order to catch a few professional claimants is unfair, and that a government credit system set up to restrain job-hopping would exceed the state's authority, since the market already screens candidates at the hiring stage.
1. The legal position
Article 3 of the Labor Law of the People's Republic of China provides that workers enjoy the right to equal employment and to choose their occupation. The right to choose work freely is a right inherent in workers under the Labor Law, and no enterprise or administrative body may deprive them of it. Under the law, too, a worker may in general terminate the employment contract and leave by giving the employer thirty days' written notice. In special circumstances, such as during the probation period, or where the employer forces work by violence, threats or unlawful restriction of personal freedom, or fails to pay remuneration in full as required by the contract and its rules, the worker may terminate the contract by notice at any time. Where an employee terminates the contract without complying with the law and the enterprise suffers loss, the enterprise may claim compensation; where the employee breaches the contract, the enterprise may claim liquidated damages or compensation.
This design of the Labor Law reflects a choice, as between protecting the enterprise and protecting the worker, in favour of the party in the weaker position, which is precisely the purpose and spirit of the Law. In recent years the media have reported cases of "workplace claims", such as deliberately refusing to sign an employment contract or volunteering to forgo social insurance, which leave enterprises nervous when recruiting. Faced with such problems, an enterprise that strictly observes the labor rules and pays social insurance for its staff in accordance with law need not compensate on termination and faces no risk in arbitration or litigation.
2. The limits of the right
The labor market is by nature a free market. An employee who changes jobs does so either because the new work suits him better and offers better prospects, or in pursuit of better pay and conditions, and this is an inevitable feature of a market economy. Tolerating job-hopping and encouraging people to choose their own work allows able people to realise their value to the full under the laws of the market, which plainly benefits the economy as a whole. Job-hopping is, moreover, a legitimate right and freedom conferred on workers by law, and there should be no question of a malicious or a non-malicious kind. To brand every job-seeker and job-changer in order to restrain a very small number of professional claimants would be thoroughly unfair, and the government need not, and has no power to, set up a credit system to regulate job-hopping.
The market is self-generating and self-adjusting, and forms its own constraints, so as to maximise the benefit of employment to enterprises. A person who changes jobs frequently will inevitably attract extra attention when looking for work, and an enterprise will be more careful in hiring and will test him at the recruitment stage. As for an employee's departure, rather than complain that staff change jobs too often, an enterprise would do better to ask itself why they leave and how to keep them, instead of setting up a credit system to hold on to them in the name of maintaining stable local economic development.
Whether a person changes jobs or leaves, the choice is made in accordance with law, and the government has neither the power nor the reason to interfere. Building a credit system is necessary, but a credit system is not omnipotent and cannot hold every piece of information; a credit system without limits to its authority will certainly not command public trust.