A Beijing district court fired a Hitachi employee Tuesday for violating working rules despite the fact that she signed a non-fixed term contract with her employer.
The Dongcheng District People's Court ruling upholds a prior decision by the Beijing Commission of Labor Disputes, the Beijing Times reports.
Jiang Tian worked for the Beijing branch of Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), a subsidiary of Hitachi. She signed a non-fixed term contract with the company in 2006, tasked with auditing bids, orders and financial affairs.
"We wanted a long-term cooperation, that's why we signed a non-fixed term contract with her," Mrs. Cui, head of the HDS sales section, said.
In May 2007, Jiang was put in charge of data input for parts of the order forms, but she continually made data errors.
Jiang argued that the mistakes resulted in updates, and asked for an auditor to double check the data.
At the end of 2007, Jiang announced that she "had to quit the data input job."
Soon after that, she received a notice requiring her to continue the work, lest she be dismissed. Jiang ignored the warning.
The warning led to her termination in May 2008.
"I can't get over it," Jiang said. "I didn't violate anything, and they fired me without proper cause."
However, HDS says they fired Jiang Tian for disobeying orders and refusing to do assigned tasks.
Significant violation of employer's working rules is enough for an employee to be fired, despite the signing of a non-fixed term contract, according to the Labor Contract Law.
(CRI July 16, 2008)