While workers in the western world agonize over what seems to be an impending job apocalypse, their Chinese counterparts are winning in pitched legal battles against AI automation.
Last week, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency, a Chinese court ruled that companies can’t use AI as an excuse to fire workers. The case involved a quality assurance supervisor, identified only by his surname Zhou, who was hired in 2022 to oversee a tech company’s AI output. When his bosses tried to replace him with a large language model (LLM) in 2025, they offered him a demotion with a 40 percent pay cut.
Unsurprisingly, Zhou refused — so the company fired him, offering a severance package worth around $45,000. Unhappy with the rather paltry payout, Zhou contested the severance offer through a government arbitration panel.
After that panel ruled in favor of Zhou on grounds that the dismissal was illegal, the company filed a lawsuit with a lower court, presumably the district-level Primary People’s Court. After losing that suit, the company then appealed to the municipal-level Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court, which upheld the lower court’s decision on the grounds that bringing on AI isn’t an excuse to start shredding job contracts.
RipComfortable7989 on
Nothing in this story relates directly to AI. The company fired him after he refused to accept a demotion package and the court said that was illegal.
Edit: keep down voting because it the article doesn’t line up with your narrative, reddit.
Raise_A_Thoth on
This is actually *incredibly* important for Americans who don’t understand how significant our legal system is in defining and curating capitalism.
Capitalism is rooted in the common law judicial system we have. It is confirmed and reinforced every time a court decides that a capitalist’s claim of ownership and control over ‘their property’ is a more important legal claim than a worker’s needs.
If you can read that and you understand what it says, you’re either a leftist or a fucking monster. If you can’t wrap your head around it, you’re like at least a plurality of Americans.
mapoku on
So when does this law hit other nations? Because greed is rampant in most of the western ones. It’s also weird that we’ve been letting so many things around it go unregulated. There needs to be reform around hiring too.
4 Comments
From the article:
While workers in the western world agonize over what seems to be an impending job apocalypse, their Chinese counterparts are winning in pitched legal battles against AI automation.
Last week, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency, a Chinese court ruled that companies can’t use AI as an excuse to fire workers. The case involved a quality assurance supervisor, identified only by his surname Zhou, who was hired in 2022 to oversee a tech company’s AI output. When his bosses tried to replace him with a large language model (LLM) in 2025, they offered him a demotion with a 40 percent pay cut.
Unsurprisingly, Zhou refused — so the company fired him, offering a severance package worth around $45,000. Unhappy with the rather paltry payout, Zhou contested the severance offer through a government arbitration panel.
After that panel ruled in favor of Zhou on grounds that the dismissal was illegal, the company filed a lawsuit with a lower court, presumably the district-level Primary People’s Court. After losing that suit, the company then appealed to the municipal-level Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court, which upheld the lower court’s decision on the grounds that bringing on AI isn’t an excuse to start shredding job contracts.
Nothing in this story relates directly to AI. The company fired him after he refused to accept a demotion package and the court said that was illegal.
Edit: keep down voting because it the article doesn’t line up with your narrative, reddit.
This is actually *incredibly* important for Americans who don’t understand how significant our legal system is in defining and curating capitalism.
Capitalism is rooted in the common law judicial system we have. It is confirmed and reinforced every time a court decides that a capitalist’s claim of ownership and control over ‘their property’ is a more important legal claim than a worker’s needs.
If you can read that and you understand what it says, you’re either a leftist or a fucking monster. If you can’t wrap your head around it, you’re like at least a plurality of Americans.
So when does this law hit other nations? Because greed is rampant in most of the western ones. It’s also weird that we’ve been letting so many things around it go unregulated. There needs to be reform around hiring too.