Asia-Pacific Labor & Employment News - Summer 2014

Message from the Editor

Welcome to the first edition of the Jones Day Asia-Pacific Labor & Employment News, which will be published quarterly and will examine labor and employment law developments across the Asia-Pacific region. Each quarter, we will provide you with a rundown of upcoming changes in law and recent key decisions of courts and regulators across the region. Jones Day has significant experience advising clients on labor and employment issues, both in transactions and disputes, throughout the Asia-Pacific region. We have decided to put this experience to use to keep our clients, colleagues, and friends abreast of changes in this rapidly developing area of law. We hope you enjoy this, our first of many legal updates on labor and employment law developments in the region.

Larry Dinardo

Upcoming and Recent Changes in the Law

Taiwan: Legislative changes to regulate use of agency workers

According to the statistics published in May 2013, Taiwan has more than 590,000 agency workers and that number is continually rising at an unprecedented rate. As such, existing labor laws governing agency workers have become both inadequate and outdated. To address this issue, Taiwan's Ministry of Labor approved the submission of the draft Protection of Agency Workers Bill on February 6, 2014. In essence, the draft bill seeks to discourage the use of agency workers as a matter of principle, The bill achieves this by limiting the types of work in which an agency worker can engage, and by setting a maximum percentage of agency workers that an enterprise ("User") may employ. The draft bill also affords agency workers the same rights as the full-time employees of the User, such as the agency worker's right to tender a formal labor contract to the User if he or she continues to work at the User after one year. The agency and the User will be jointly and severally liable if the agency worker is not duly paid or suffers damages due to work performed.

China: Government limits opportunity for the use of contractors by foreign corporations

On March 1, the Interim Provisions on Labor Dispatch ("Interim Provisions"), which were promulgated by the Chinese Ministry of Human and Social Security on January 24, came into effect. This move demonstrates the intention of the Chinese legislature to limit the use of dispatch workers, whose rights are akin to those of contract workers in common law countries, by Foreign Invested Enterprises ("FIEs"). The history of...