A last-minute jurisdiction challenge that cost the employer more than it bargained for
An employer's eleventh-hour bid to strike out a wage claim failed, with enhanced costs ordered, Deputy District Judge Adrian Lai held on 26 May 2026.
The ruling came on the day the trial was due to begin in Hong Kong. A week earlier, the company had filed a summons asking the court to throw out the employee's counterclaim for outstanding wages, arguing the court had no power to hear it.
The employee worked for the food-and-beverage services company from March 2017 to May 2022. After the relationship ended, the employer sued, claiming damages for breach of various common law duties. The employee, in turn, counterclaimed for about HK$58,000 in outstanding wages covering June 2020 to May 2022, plus interest, and alternatively for HK$20,000 said to relate to a dishonoured cheque. Those claims have yet to be tried.
The dispute that reached the judge was narrower. Wage claims normally sit within the exclusive jurisdiction of Hong Kong's Labour Tribunal under the Labour Tribunal Ordinance. The employer seized on the procedural history, arguing the counterclaim had never been properly transferred from the tribunal and was defective for want of jurisdiction.
The wages claim had begun in the Labour Tribunal, which declined jurisdiction and sent it to the District Court, where it took a fresh case number. A registrar later gave the employee leave to discontinue that separate file after the same...
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