China will consider legal protection for employees who have to stay online after office hours, a form of “invisible overtime” that the supreme court says warrants compensation.

Lyu Guoquan, head of the general office of China’s trade union federation, proposed to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) last week that the country create a legal definition and compensation framework for “working overtime online”.

Lyu told China National Radio on Sunday that the proposal had been accepted by the country’s top political advisory body, and various government agencies would begin discussing the idea with him.

The issue was also raised on Friday by the president of the Supreme People’s Court, who highlighted such “invisible overtime” in his work report to the National People’s Congress, the country’s top legislature.

As in many countries, it has become increasingly common for people in China to reply to after-hours work-related messages on instant messaging apps like WeChat, and handle work on their phones during days off.

Chief justice Zhang Jun told the NPC that Chinese courts came up with the standard for “invisible overtime” last year.

Zhang said a person was considered to be working overtime if they “contributed substantive labour” to tasks that “evidently consume time” – a definition that included staying online.

“The standards guarantee that online [overtime] work is rewarded and offline rest is protected,” he said.

China’s courts have weighed a number of cases involving online overtime payments in recent years, including one cited by the supreme court as a model for other judiciaries to follow.

The case involved the director of a short video team, surnamed Li, who sued their employer for unpaid overtime after being laid off in 2020, according to details released jointly by the supreme court, the human resources ministry and the All-China Federation of Trade Unions.

A lower court concluded that the time Li spent on WeChat for work messages during their time off should also be “considered” when calculating overtime compensation. But the supreme court admitted that the time spent was “scattered and difficult to calculate”.

The statement did not identify the plaintiff or where the case took place.

Lou Yu, director of the Social Law Institute at China University of Political Science and Law, said it was very likely that rules would be formulated to regulate online overtime.

China should improve protection for workers from “invisible overtime”, according to policy advisers and lawmakers at the ongoing “two sessions” in Beijing, with the world’s second-largest economy particularly struggling against high youth unemployment.

Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference delegate Lyu Guoquan, who is the director of the general office of China’s trade union federation, has proposed including the right of “offline rest” into labour laws, while also raising the legal penalties for companies involved in “invisible overtime practices”.

“Digital information technology in the internet era … has blurred the ‘boundaries’ between work and life, making invisible overtime increasingly normalised as ‘unpaid overtime’,” Lyu said, according to the state-owned Workers’ Daily newspaper on Tuesday.

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