Replying to WeChat after work, is it considered overtime?

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2024-05-15 09:00Posted on the official account of Beijing People

Replying to WeChat after work, is it considered overtime?

In 2022, in Beijing, there was a labor dispute case that seemed ordinary, but because the judge noticed the "invisible overtime" problem in it, the trend of the case became unusual.

The facts of the case are as follows: A woman surnamed Li was removed from various work groups because of a conflict with the company's leaders, and she did not go to work at the company after that, and was eventually fired by the company for absenteeism. Dissatisfied, Ms. Li sued the company in labor arbitration and the grassroots court, and filed several claims for compensation, but the lawsuit was unsuccessful. She continued to appeal, and the second instance of the case fell to Judge Zheng Jizhe of the Beijing No. 3 Intermediate People's Court (hereinafter referred to as the "No. 3 Intermediate People's Court").

Zheng Jizhe has worked in the court for almost 14 years and has presided over nearly 4,000 cases, many of which are labor disputes. He noticed that Ms. Li's demand for overtime pay was different from the past, her position was the head of operations, she often received messages and calls from leaders late at night, and she was on duty in the customer's WeChat group on weekends, so she was firmly tied to WeChat, and there was no dividing line between work and life, which was a typical online "invisible overtime". However, there is no legal definition of "invisible overtime", and the overtime claim was rejected in the first instance due to insufficient evidence and difficult identification.

The controversy in the case is obvious: different from traditional overtime, which does not occur at the office workstation, but on the computer or mobile phone at home, can such a form of work be supported as overtime?

According to the 2022 Survey Report on the Status of Overtime in the Workplace released by FutureFree, 84.7% of employees still pay attention to work-related information after work, suffering from "invisible overtime". Zheng Jizhe realizes that this is a common problem. He flipped through the electronic case file of Ms. Li's case page by page, and finally caught some small but crucial evidence, made a change of judgment, and supported Ms. Li's overtime appeal.

In the adjudication document, Zheng Jizhe explicitly used the term "invisible overtime" for the first time and explained the concept of "invisible overtime". After the verdict was announced, the case was searched many times, and it was also mentioned in the work report of the two sessions this year, and was selected into the reference case database of courts across the country. This means that the court has a clear reference for the relevant cases of "invisible overtime" in its subsequent judgment.

In March this year, I met Zheng Jizhe in a conference room of the Third Intermediate People's Court, his eyes small, his face smiling, and his voice soft, without the majesty that judges are used to displaying. In fact, he spoke with warmth, and he was a judge of the Third Intermediate People's Court who was known for his speed, "walking and trotting, eating by the second". As a worker, he is also the judge who works the most overtime, arriving at the unit at the earliest and leaving the latest every day. When his children were very young, because they worked late every day, they always couldn't see him, and he thought that his father would only get off work on Friday nights.

In addition to Ms. Li's case, Zheng Jizhe also told us about the changes he has observed in labor dispute cases in recent years, and the difficulty of adjudicating cases in the field of overtime has also increased, and judges often feel "torn between two sides".

But as long as the evidence is sufficient, Zheng Jizhe will always choose to protect the workers. Just like the case of "invisible overtime", even if there is pressure to change the verdict and the judicial interpretation of this is blank, he still wants to provide a new attempt and sample to make a small change on the issue of overtime.

The following is based on Zheng Jizhe's account and the verdict of the case.

Text: Cheng Jingzhi

Editor|Huai Yang

Photo (unless otherwise noted) provided by the interviewee

1

In terms of the type of lawsuit, it didn't feel like a rare case at the time. I remember that the case was held online, and the client did not appear in court, but the lawyer represented her and gave a detailed description of the case in court:

Ms. Li joined an Internet company in Beijing in April 2019 as the person in charge of product operation. The labor contract between the two parties stipulates that Ms. Li will implement an irregular working hours system, 10 days of paid annual leave every year, a basic salary of 15,500 yuan, and a bonus according to the project situation. After being dismissed, Ms. Li applied for labor arbitration and made several requests for payment of overtime pay, wages for unused annual leave, and compensation for illegal termination of the labor contract, which amounted to hundreds of thousands, but were rejected by the labor arbitration and the court of first instance. Ms. Li was not satisfied, so she appealed to the Beijing No. 3 Intermediate People's Court, where I worked.

As a judge of the second instance, no new evidence was submitted to the case before the trial, and I combed through the judgment of the first instance and the appeal of the second instance, focusing on the focus of the lawsuit between the two parties. In some cases, the judge of the first instance has already made it very clear and the reasons given are sufficient, so I don't need to retry the case in detail. But when I was reading the papers, I only felt that overtime pay seemed to be different from the previous situation.

In the chat records and other evidence provided by Ms. Li, it can be seen that her usual work content is very complicated, including building an operational organizational structure, managing a content team, business development, etc. Due to the nature of the operation, she needs to use social media such as WeChat and DingTalk to communicate with colleagues and maintain customer relationships during off-duty hours or rest days on some working days, which is "online overtime" at home. But the company's argument is that it is just to reply to the information that the customer needs and make a phone call to the employee, which is not in the category of overtime.

In traditional cases, overtime work is overtime, and the employee's claim is generally clear, such as going to the work unit on a rest day, or not leaving after work, providing a punch-in record can prove that the employee is in attendance. However, the controversy in this case is that Ms. Li's overtime work is very "invisible", not at the office workstation, but on the computer or mobile phone at home.

The court of first instance ruled in favor of it, giving the reason that most of the dates claimed by Ms. Li were not statutory holidays; Unable to prove the specific work content and working hours; The contract between the two parties has stipulated an "irregular working hours". In fact, more cases are similar to the judgment made by the judge of first instance, because there is no clear law or judicial interpretation that the judgment must be supported if the online overtime work is applied, and in many cases, the judge does not know how to admit it even if he wants to.

However, in the second instance, there was such a reversal, and only special positions that meet the requirements of the state and have been approved by the human resources and social security department can the employer implement the irregular working hours system, such as department stores and supermarkets. Ms. Li's agent admitted in court that their irregular working hours had not been approved.

The lawyer went on to argue that according to the DingTalk attendance records provided by Ms. Li, it was not that the company did not evaluate her working hours, but that she needed to clock in and out according to the standard working hours. In other words, the so-called "irregular working hours" in the contract is actually a shell, and the company is equivalent to overturning its own statement.

During the more than one-hour trial, the company did not deny Ms. Li's labor, which also made it more reasonable to support Ms. Li's online work as overtime. But if the case is to be reversed, what are the specific angles of reasoning? How to characterize the concept of "invisible overtime"? How to quantify overtime hours?

After the trial, these prominent questions lingered in my mind.

Evidence of overtime listed by the party. Source: CCTV News

2

In order to answer the above questions, I quickly took the assistant team to start collecting information, selecting "WeChat office", "invisible overtime" and other keywords, and dividing them into three major parts for search according to habits.

One is to search for judgment documents to see if there are relevant precedents in the past; the second is to check the papers of Zhiwang to see if the relevant arguments have been refined in terms of academic theory; The third is to search for official accounts, news, and data reports related to labor law to see information related to overtime and gain an in-depth understanding of society's views on it.

The judicial interpretation of the concept of "invisible overtime" is indeed blank and there is no regulation. However, I have noticed that some judges have made judgments in favor of similar cases, but they have not distilled "invisible overtime" as a point for judicial discussion. In addition, I also noticed a case in which the sudden illness and death of an employee while working online on WeChat was regarded as a work-related injury, and although the lawsuit did not involve the issue of overtime pay, the judge found the work-related injury in the judgment, indirectly recognizing that online work is an overtime act.

In addition to referring to precedents, I also paid more attention to a "Survey Report on the Status of Overtime in the Workplace" released by FutureFree, and I was particularly impressed by several data in it:

——91.6% of employees need to work overtime to a greater or lesser extent, and nearly 60% of employees work an average of more than one hour a day;

- 84.7% of employees still pay attention to work-related information after work;

- 40.5% of employees do not receive any form of compensation (overtime pay, compensatory leave) after working overtime;

——31.2% of employees believe that overtime affects their physical health.

The report also mentions that "the workload is too large to be completed without overtime", and "the occurrence of emergencies" is the main reason for overtime. I feel that the young people who make up the main force in the workplace actually have a similar experience to Ms. Li in this case, suffering from "invisible overtime". I wondered, since overtime is a common problem, at least there is a basis for adjudication, and the law has never said that "invisible overtime" cannot be judged, why can't we break through?

With this understanding, I returned to Ms. Li's specific case and began to look through the electronic case file page by page, meticulously sorting out the evidence.

At this time, I saw Ms. Li's WeChat chat records, 8:00, 9:00, 10:00, 11:00, 12:00 in the evening, it can be said that at various time periods, there are conversations or WeChat meetings between leaders and her, so that she can arrange what work she does. Ms. Li also made a screenshot of the WeChat group, densely packed with such large pages, showing a variety of customer groups, groups, and team groups, each group is a few hundred people, and there are at least 50 of them.

At that time, I understood why Ms. Li felt tired and why she advocated that the company's "answer a few questions" would have a big impact on her life. If I encounter this situation and am always afraid of missing the news of the leader, can I still rest?

In addition, I also noticed that Ms. Li provided a "Holiday Community Official Account Duty Schedule", which requires the operation team to answer customer questions online at all times, and the details are very demanding, such as "reply to a sentence in the group first when receiving user needs (within 30 seconds)" and "process the article (complete within 2 minutes)".

In the corresponding chat log, Ms. Li, as the team leader, studied with 5 girls in a group how to arrange the class, and finally agreed that one person would be responsible for each half day, so as to ensure that everyone could spend at least a week of undisturbed complete weekends in a month. Someone sighed in the group that they didn't have to worry about getting up early that week and had a good night's sleep.

At that time, I was very touched in my heart, and I felt that it was not easy to be a laborer. Our country began to implement the two-day holiday system in 1995, and next year will be the thirtieth year. Why are workers firmly tied to WeChat, and have to reply to this group, that group, and come to work on weekends? This also strengthened my determination to identify and correct the problem of "invisible overtime", and the rights and interests of workers should be protected.

Next, it comes to the question of how to reason with the case. My main consideration is to return to the essence of overtime and put forward two principles: one is to "provide substantive labor", that is, the worker has really done his work; The second is that "obviously taking up rest time", which affects the right to rest of employees, which is a new concept of "invisible overtime".

In this case, I also emphasized the characteristics of "periodicity" and "fixity". Considering that the employer raised that "occasional replies to questions are not overtime", it is indeed difficult for us to prove how many questions Ms. Li answered, but this is not the key, the key is that the duty schedule proves that the employer is managing the employment, which is different from the temporary and occasional simple communication. Since the employer has arranged work, it should be deemed to constitute overtime and the employee should be compensated.

Our court's jurisdiction, including Chaoyang District, will come into contact with many technology companies, and judging from the cases heard in recent years, many enterprises are using digital means to implement precise management of workers. Not only attendance, but also the assignment of a work task, when it is completed, when it is uploaded, and whether it is passed, there are time nodes that are accurate to what time it is.

Internet technology has indeed made the working mode of workers more and more flexible, but it has also blurred the work and life of workers. Even if you are at home, or when you are on vacation, as long as you have a mobile phone or computer, you can still work, and on the surface it looks like you are resting, but in fact you are not, and overtime is invisible. When disputes do arise, workers often lack an effective legal basis to contend with them.

All of this made me sure that the words "invisible overtime" should be written in the draft of the judgment. 「…… The issue of hidden overtime should not be denied solely because the employee did not work at the employer's workplace, but should be blurred about the concept of the workplace and determine the overtime situation by comprehensively considering whether the employee has provided substantive work content." This is also the first time that the words "invisible overtime" have appeared in a judgment document.

The words "invisible overtime" appeared in the judgment document, and the source network was the source

3

In fact, in labor dispute cases, the confrontation between the two parties is very sharp. Whether it's invisible overtime or other types of overtime, the real challenge is how the worker proves it.

In the provisions of the judicial interpretation, the burden of proof for proving overtime lies with the employee, who must firstly prove the fact that he works for the employer in addition to the normal working hours, and second, he must prove that the extended working hours were arranged by the employer. But with the development of digitalization, it is becoming more and more difficult to prove these two points.

As a common example, in traditional overtime cases, the evidence often relies on the attendance sheet (which the employer needs to provide) with the employee's signature record. But now, digital attendance has occupied the mainstream, DingTalk software punch card is good, many companies use their own developed attendance software, once a labor dispute occurs, workers often can only think of exporting an electronic version of the Excel attendance sheet, but there is no official seal on it, if the company firmly denies it, there is an authenticity problem, there is a risk that it cannot be identified as valid evidence.

Of course, for overtime claims, it is not enough to simply provide clock-in records, and the employee must also prove that the overtime work was arranged by the employer, which emphasizes the attribute of "arrangement". If you think about it, if the worker just doesn't leave after work, and goes to clock in every day on weekends, he may not do anything, and he also asks the employer to pay overtime, which is definitely unreasonable, so only if the employer arranges for you to work overtime, it has the obligation to pay.

However, it is also difficult to prove the "arrangement", because the company usually sends overtime notices through the intranet and internal mailbox, and even if the employee downloads it, he or she cannot enter the intranet after leaving the company, and there is still no way to provide a source of evidence.

For the above situation, what the worker can do is to pay attention to the timely preservation of the electronic evidence, not only screenshots, but also screen recording, which can better confirm the authenticity of the evidence.

At present, employers will also emphasize the "overtime approval system", which clearly states in the labor contract or rules and regulations that overtime must be approved by the employer, otherwise it will not be counted. Many workers are very depressed, because no matter how they apply, the unit will not approve it, and some will not even let you mention it, and their rights will be violated in silence.

For such cases, it is up to the court to increase the verification of evidence, and if it is arranged by the unit, even if there is no approval, it will be counted as overtime. The year before last, I encountered a case, the worker is a secretary, a lot of work is done online, late at night or early in the morning the boss will send her WeChat, to whom to book a ticket, book a hotel, responsible for arranging who who's itinerary, may not be at work time, Huhu Huhu for the boss for more than an hour of work. Later, a labor dispute arose between the two parties, and the worker applied for overtime pay, although there was no overtime approval, but the WeChat record could prove that it was a feature arranged by the boss, and finally I also determined that it was overtime, and awarded more than 10,000 yuan as appropriate.

In the face of digital development, we judges also find that it is becoming more and more difficult to hear cases in the field of overtime, and we often feel torn between holding seminars and judges' salons to discuss many new issues in the ambiguous area.

For example, in the problem of invisible overtime, we believe that "simple communication" is not overtime, but how to define "simple communication"? Replies such as "okay" and "received" are simple communication, but a little further, how to recognize a document forwarded in the group? If you want to forward to 50 groups, you still need to modify the wording, how to recognize this?

The exact length of invisible overtime is also difficult to quantify. It's hard to say that you can keep a record of 10 minutes of work for your boss. Ms. Li's case is also unfair in terms of the full length of time, after all, online work and life are intertwined, and in the judgment, I can only comprehensively consider her overtime frequency, content, and salary standards, and sentence the company to pay 30,000 yuan, which is equivalent to two months' salary.

In addition to invisible overtime, overtime for special workers in vulnerable positions should actually be more concerned and protected. For example, I once encountered a case of an elevator worker, the elevator runs from morning to evening, the worker's job is to press the elevator, take three days off and one day, work 14 hours a day, not allowed to leave the post, leave the post, rest, and eat must also be in the elevator duty room. According to the labor law, he can work up to 3 hours of overtime a day, but he is equivalent to 6 hours of overtime, which is a serious violation of the law by the employer.

The worker, a disabled person whose monthly salary is the minimum wage standard in Beijing, later had a dispute with his employer, and he also filed an application for overtime pay in a lawsuit, which reached more than 180,000 according to the standard working hours. But from the perspective of the unit, this work is far less tiring than that of manual workers, doing it when there are people, and resting in the elevator when there is no one, so is this considered overtime?

In the first instance, part of the overtime claims were upheld, and the unit was sentenced to pay more than 20,000 yuan. The employer will say this and then another, and finally express that the worker can lie down and rest at noon, and there is a sofa in the duty room. However, according to the attendance records provided by the worker and the statement of the property, she had to work for so long when the elevator was running for so long every day, and finally accepted the worker's proposition of "7 in the morning and 9 in the evening". Although the elevator workers are not so tired in terms of intensity, considering the physiological needs of natural persons, I think that the workers need to work in the elevator for 14 hours without rest, and finally made a judgment to pay 100,000 yuan in overtime pay.

You will find that in the judicial field, the overtime issues involve detailed and complex points, and there is no definite standard answer to many things, sometimes limited to evidence, sometimes limited to the facts of the case, and need to be reconsidered according to the specific case. You may feel that overtime is a problem that the majority of workers react to strongly, but in fact, judges are also struggling with how to come up with convincing rules and make a reasonable judgment all day long.

Photo provided by Zheng Jizhe in the sentencing case

4

The reason why I am able to be sympathetic to workers is that I grew up in a family of workers.

I was born in Shenyang, my father was an administrator in a hospital, and my mother worked as a statistician in a state-owned enterprise. I remember when I was a child, my mother often had to work overtime, and at least one or two days at the end of each month, she would count the work in the production workshop and stay up until the second half of the night. I waited until I went to bed and didn't see my mother come back, and I didn't see her until I woke up the next morning, and I was very worried about my mother, I was afraid that my mother would be tired, and I was afraid that my mother would be in danger of walking at night, and I felt very sorry for her when I saw her tired return in the morning. Now my mom is almost 70 years old and has been retired for more than ten years.

My dad was not so busy with work, he paid more attention to my education, and was responsible for sending me to and from school and to cram school. When I was in high school, there was a court program on the local TV station in Shenyang, which broadcast the process of the trial and the final verdict of the judge. That sense of seriousness appealed to me, and it became my motivation to study law.

In 2003, I applied for the law school of China University of Political Science and Law and came to Beijing. After graduating from graduate school, I was first admitted to the First Intermediate People's Court, and then selected to the Third Intermediate People's Court, and now I have been almost 14 years old, and I have undertaken 4,000 cases, half of which are labor dispute cases. My colleagues said that I "walked and trotted, ate by the second", and almost every day I arrived at work at the earliest and left at the latest. My child is relatively young, often when he sleeps, I haven't come home yet, and when he gets up in the morning, I go to work before 7 o'clock, so my child thinks that Dad only gets off work on Friday night, and I feel indebted, so I bring him a lot of snacks back on Friday.

I work overtime really hard, especially in recent years, the annual caseload is particularly large, and I handle the case in detail, if I feel that the case is unreasonable and suspicious, I will not give the case an easy judgment. If I can't convince myself, I have to think about it again, study it again, read the case file again, go through the evidence, and even call the lawyer at eight or nine o'clock in the evening to supplement the evidence. Only when I have been persuaded to get closer to the facts and truth, and to feel a sense of relief in my heart, will I make a final judgment. Therefore, my second-instance judgment is often longer than that of the first-instance trial, and even if the original judgment is upheld, it will be reasoned from the beginning according to my logic.

Regarding labor dispute cases, in fact, what impressed me the most was when I first came to work in the Third Intermediate People's Court, and every year when the Chinese New Year was approaching, I could always receive cases from migrant workers. Unlike today's white-collar workers, there are contracts against the company, and some can also provide recording evidence, but the awareness of migrant workers is very weak, and some do not even have an IOU, and they take the statistical sheet of their own work.

In this kind of case, there are basically no lawyers, and the laborers themselves appear in court, their education level is not high, their faces are wrinkled, they take out their own fragmentary notes in court, and some even bring work tools, saying that they are doing work with this thing, why don't they admit it? As a judge, I was anxious for the workers, and what they said was likely to be true, but the evidence was not solid, so I always wanted to ask the employer for details repeatedly through my work. At that time, many cases were not in court, but after the trial, the employer or foreman was pulled out of the courtroom and mediated with them.

I remember the laborer said to me, "Judge, can this case be heard soon?" We waited to get the money and took the bus home for the New Year. The words contain a trust in me, so I have developed the habit of "walking and trotting, eating by the second", and the case must be handled quickly and carefully.

In the template of the judgment document of the second instance, the last line is always written like this, "This judgment is final". This is the line I am most familiar with, and it is also a line that weighs as much as a thousand pounds. Labor dispute cases in our country adopt the system of "one adjudication and two trials", and for many workers, they may be exhausted after two or three years of litigation, and the second instance is their last hope. I understand the torment and pressure of ordinary people fighting lawsuits, so I have a heavy sense of responsibility, and I must come up with sufficient theories in each case to make a final response to the workers, worthy of the words "final judgment".

After listening to Zheng Jizhe's law popularization class, the residents gave him a thumbs up. Photo courtesy of the interviewee

5

After so many years of adjudicating labor dispute cases, I can feel that there have been great changes in related cases in recent years.

The most intuitive feeling is that the number of cases continues to rise, taking my caseload as an example, in the past three years, more than 700 cases have been closed each year, at least 1.5 times the number of cases in 2020, and labor disputes are definitely increasing.

There is also a feeling that job transfer has become an obvious cause of conflict between workers and employers. On the one hand, the awareness of workers' rights protection is becoming higher and they want to protect their right to development as employees, and on the other hand, the company exercises the right to labor management, some of which cancel certain types of positions, some of which lead to job changes due to technological innovation, and some of which are "insulting transfers", such as transferring managers to cleaners. Because the positions of the two sides are different, conflicts can easily lead to labor disputes.

I am particularly impressed, at the end of last year, a well-known listed company, suddenly implemented a wolf culture, a form was sent down, requiring employees to develop several customers within a month, and there was no reward for completing the target, but the money would be deducted if it was not completed. As a result, there was a worker who was at the bottom of the grade, and the company transferred him to another position. The next script was written, the worker resolutely did not accept it, and did not go to report, the unit said that he did not obey the management, first warned and deducted money, and then was absenteeism for three days, according to the company's rules and regulations, a notice of termination of the labor contract was issued to him.

As mentioned earlier, my trial of cases is generally relatively detailed, so I went to the Internet to search for the background information of the parties to this case, and found that he had done a good job in this company before, and there was a photo of him holding the red flag of advanced workers in the company's WeChat official account, but he failed the "wolf" assessment and lost his job.

In the second instance, I supported the worker. Employers already have many means to manage workers, but workers are not machines, but flesh and blood people, and they also want to seek better development. Even if there is an agreement in the contract between the two parties that the company has the right to transfer the position, under normal circumstances, we still believe that it is necessary to reach a consensus, after all, when it comes to major changes in the position of employees, the impact on people is not half a star.

There is also a case that we just judged in March, which is also very typical, in the advertising design industry, the performance of the unit declined, and the worker wanted to transfer the worker from Wangjing to Guanzhuang, but the worker did not agree, so the unit changed its approach and increased the workload for him in disguise. It turned out that he drew about 40 design drawings a day, but suddenly increased to 50, and then rose all the way to 60, and he tried to complete it, as can be seen from the overtime approval, he had to work overtime for two and a half hours a day. As a result, the unit told him that he needed 70 tickets starting tomorrow, and the worker was in a hurry, and directly told the unit that he refused to work overtime and refused to work an unreasonable workload, and the unit opened him on the grounds of disobedience to work management.

Both the arbitration and the first instance held that the company had legally terminated the employment contract because there was no evidence to prove that the workload was unreasonable and that the employee had indeed resisted. But in the second instance, I re-checked the evidence and found that the company had formulated a quarterly appraisal form, which drew about 40 charts a day, and the performance was a full score, and two employees in the group appeared in court to testify to the workers, saying that they could not finish it. The judgment clearly pointed out that although the employer has the right to manage the work, it should set the work within a reasonable range, and the employee's refusal of an unreasonable workload does not constitute disobedience to the work arrangement.

These two cases are just a microcosm, and similar cases of performance appraisal that bring about job transfer problems are one by one. In the past two years, some companies have not achieved good results, so they have set their performance too high, failed to complete the job transfer, or directly terminated the labor contract, but this is definitely illegal, and the workers can basically win the lawsuit if they sue the law.

At present, there are still many companies that will make some strong agreements for employees, such as setting 50 or 60 terms for terminating the contract, playing performance appraisal according to mood, and engaging in the last elimination system, which is an infringement of the legitimate rights and interests of employees. It is very likely that the employee will sign a lot of terms that are unfavorable to him, or be forced to make unreasonable agreements, but in fact, the company is not allowed to create other conditions for unilateral termination of the employment contract, except for the circumstances expressly provided by law, such as the bankruptcy of the company. Think about it, if the company arbitrarily opens conditions and lets workers do 1 million at the end of the year, and they can't finish leaving without any compensation, why? Therefore, from the perspective of the court, we should increase the intensity of the review of the contract rules and regulations, and make an invalid judgment on unreasonable strong agreements.

Workers need to be protected, but the courts also protect the legitimate rights and interests of enterprises. For example, there is such a case, the employee watched "Smiling Proud Jianghu" for three days, was found by the unit and fired, sued to the court of second instance, the unit said that everyone was very busy, he was watching a TV series, at first the worker did not admit it, because it was a design industry, he said that he was studying Ming Dynasty clothing. I also checked all his Internet browsing records for three days, and found that the broadcast started at nine o'clock in the morning, and the time of each episode was different, some of them were turned on at double speed or fast forward, while watching, I also checked the star scandals of the actors, which is really an immersive experience. It's not the same as the general situation of going to work, and in the end I will judge the unit to win, otherwise it will be too unfair to the unit.

Of course, as long as the evidence of the worker is sufficient, the court will more support the worker. Regarding Ms. Li's case, my original intention was to bring her fairness and justice, but I also felt that I needed to find a small incision to push the law forward. Although the amount of compensation awarded in the final judgment is not very large, it can at least provide a new attempt and sample, and when everyone talks about "invisible overtime" in the future, you may see such a case that can be referred to.

I have always felt that adjudication documents should not be cold, but should be understandable to the people. Sometimes, when the employer goes too far and finds various reasons to create obstacles for the employee, I will express my anger in the judgment. In the "invisible overtime" case, the verdict is my own answer sheet, but the issue of overtime is still a very thick line, and there is still a lot of room for improvement in the judiciary.

After all, it is a case of reversal of judgment, I think it will have a certain impact, and the courts in the jurisdiction and the basic courts will pay attention to the issue of "invisible overtime", but I did not expect that under the attention of the media, the case has been on the hot search many times and caused a sensational discussion, which can actually reflect that a considerable proportion of workers are deeply trapped by it.

The case was mentioned in the work report of the two sessions this year, and on February 27 this year, it was also included in the reference case database of courts across the country, and the Supreme People's Court recognized the two principles of "providing substantive labor" and "obviously occupying time" that constitute the determination of "invisible overtime", which means that the court has a clear reference for the subsequent judgment of the relevant case. We can also search through the judgment document website, and the word "invisible overtime" appears in more judgments.

The "right to take a break offline" is also hotly discussed, and the reason why the reaction is so strong is that workers really want to have their own private space after work without being disturbed by work. Everyone feels the same way, a WeChat "ding" sound, or an email, a comfortable weekend is gone. I have also noticed some opinions, such as "there is no normal overtime pay, and what is the right to offline breaks", and many people in the workplace have a feeling of helplessness in the face of the current situation. At present, the right to offline rest is also in the conceptual stage, and there are no relevant laws and regulations to make clear provisions, and I hope to see some new changes in the future.

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