A court in China has ruled it illegal for a company to terminate an employee on the grounds that an artificial intelligence replacement would be cheaper, affirming limits on AI-driven job displacement amid a wave of anxiety over the technology\u2019s potential to fuel unemployment.<\/p>\n
A 35-year-old worker surnamed Zhou who oversaw AI-generated responses at a fintech firm in Hangzhou, capital of east China\u2019s Zhejiang province, was fired after refusing a demotion and pay cut. The company told him his role could be replaced by AI.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t believe AI technology has reached the point where it can substantially replace human workers,\u201d said Shi Guoqiang, a judge with the Hangzhou Intermediate People\u2019s Court, in an interview with state broadcaster CCTV.<\/p>\n
Zhou filed for labour arbitration and won at every stage \u2013 from arbitration to trial and appeal. Courts ruled that the company had illegally terminated his contract and ordered the firm to pay Zhou over 260,000 yuan (US$38,067) in compensation, according to a recent CCTV report.<\/p>\n
The court found that replacing a worker on cost grounds did not constitute a \u201cmaterial change in objective circumstances\u201d that justified terminating a labour contract, a legal standard typically applied in situations such as mergers and acquisitions.<\/p>\n
The Guangzhou Intermediate People\u2019s Court reached the same conclusion in 2024, ruling that a graphic designer\u2019s AI replacement did not qualify as a change in \u201cobjective circumstances\u201d, according to CCTV.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A court in China has ruled it illegal for a company to terminate an employee on the grounds…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26411,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,17642,25,12719,387,17638,6726,17635,17640,17636,17639,17641,12152,5872,156,17637],"class_list":{"0":"post-26410","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ai","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-driven-job-displacement","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-cctv","12":"tag-china","13":"tag-guangzhou-intermediate-peoples-court","14":"tag-hangzhou","15":"tag-intermediate-peoples-court-of-hangzhou-city","16":"tag-international-labour-organization","17":"tag-labour-disputes","18":"tag-national-bureau-of-statistics","19":"tag-shi-guoqiang","20":"tag-stanford","21":"tag-unemployment","22":"tag-us","23":"tag-zhejiang"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26410\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}