Demoted to 3,000 Yuan a Month After Announcing Her Pregnancy, a Property Manager Is Fired for 'Missing Targets'

Luo did what Chinese labour experts say an employee in her position should do. In June, newly pregnant, she reported it to her employer, Aolian Property Management's Qingzhen branch in Guizhou province, and kept working. What followed, she told the Guizhou broadcaster Bazhong Guanzhu, was a demotion from customer-service deputy manager to client supervisor — with the salary falling from just over 8,000 yuan a month to between 2,500 and 3,000 — a dismissal when she objected, and a company explanation resting entirely on one phrase: underperformance.

The firm's response, delivered by a manager surnamed He, did not deny the timeline so much as reframe it. The demotion and dismissal were applied to everyone equally, he said, and had nothing to do with the pregnancy: Luo had never formally requested maternity leave or reported her condition in writing at the time, and — in the line that spread across Weibo — she "can't use pregnancy to tie up the company's performance assessments" (不能以怀孕来捆绑公司的业绩考核). The broadcaster's report has been shared widely enough to push the case onto Baidu's hot searches, where users have been dissecting the company's logic all day.

Chinese law is unusually blunt on this point. The Labour Contract Law voids the dismissal of a pregnant employee except for serious misconduct, and the burden of proving a lawful performance-based termination falls on the employer — which must show a valid assessment system, evidence the employee failed it, and a fair process. A paper trail that begins the month after a pregnancy is announced is precisely what labour lawyers describe as the classic losing exhibit. "Dismissing an employee during pregnancy is unlawful," the lawyer cited in the report said flatly.

That gap between the written rule and the office-level practice is what readers responded to. Commenters traded stories of performance reviews used as an all-purpose instrument — "you take leave, your score drops, and there's nothing you can do about the arithmetic," as one put it — in workplaces where a demotion to 3,000 yuan a month is designed to produce exactly the resignation that a lawful dismissal cannot. The case echoes the arbitration win won by the Shanghai employee who was fired for refusing an overnight hard-seat business trip: another employer discovering that creative personnel management does not survive contact with a tribunal.

Luo says she will take her case to the labour authorities. If it gets there, the company will have to produce the performance records it has so far invoked without showing — and explain why a valued deputy manager's targets were suddenly unmet in the same season she told it she was expecting a child.