Change your mindset for China employment contracts.

If you have or are going to have any employees in China, you need a China-centric written employment contract with all of your China employees. Every few months, one of our China employment lawyers will get a company asking us to “translate our existing employment agreements into Chinese for our China office.”

Our response to this request is always the same: “Sorry, we cannot do that because the end result will not work at all for China. You need a China specific employment agreement and our translating what you are using (in the United States or the UK or Canada or Australia or Spain or France or wherever) is not going to work.”

An employment agreement not written specifically for China will contain provisions that do not comply with China’s employment laws or are unworkable in your specific locale in China. It also will fail to contain provisions that are absolutely necessary for China or for the locale in China where your employees will be located. (For similar reasons, our unwillingness to “just translate a contract into Chinese” extends to every contract we do. See Translate Your Contract For China? Not Gonna Do It.)

The most common example our China employment lawyers see in foreign employment agreements of something that will not work under China’s employment system and that can be harmful is a contract provision stating that the employment is at-will. Under an employment at-will system, an employer is said to be...

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