Fired for Refusing an Overnight Hard-Seat Trip: Shanghai Arbitration Sides With Employee
A Shanghai project manager refused an overnight hard-seat train to Chengdu that would have had her punch in by 9 a.m. after a night without sleep, and was fired for absenteeism. Labor arbitration has ruled the dismissal unlawful — and the case has become a national talking point about who absorbs the cost of cheap business travel.
The assignment looked routine: travel from Shanghai to Chengdu by train overnight, then present yourself at the company's office there by 9 a.m. The catch was the ticket. To cut costs, the company had booked its project manager — identified in reports as Ms. Qu — a hard seat on a train that departed in the evening and arrived the next morning, and put her up in a suburban hotel more than an hour's commute from the office.
She declined in a message her lawyer would later quote approvingly: "Too tiring — sitting all night, I wouldn't even get to sleep. I'm not going." The company's administrator answered that refusing the trip would count as absenteeism, and that three days' absenteeism meant dismissal. Three days later, the company made good on it and terminated her contract.
Last week the case reached labor arbitration, and the ruling has turned a private dispute into a national talking point: the dismissal was unlawful. Qu had refused an unreasonable arrangement with good reason, arbitration found — and behind that finding sits a line an international reader might not expect in Chinese labor law: Article 43 of the constitution, which states plainly that workers in China have the right to rest.
For readers unfamiliar with China's trains, the class matters. A hard seat (硬座) is the cheapest seated class on the rails — upright, non-reclining chairs at shared tables, carriage lights on all night, on a route that runs well over a thousand miles. A sleeper berth costs roughly twice as much. The company's itinerary thus left no window in which its employee could sleep, reach a distant hotel, and still clock in on time; the point of the booking, as one widely shared post put it, was that she would "ride all night and punch in the next morning."
The case spread because it dramatizes an argument Chinese workers are actually having — about 996 schedules, unpaid travel time, and the gap between what employment contracts say and what managers assume. It reached Baidu's trending board under the headline "Employee refuses overnight hard-seat business trip and is fired," and a Zhihu question on whether such dismissals are legal drew detailed answers from employment lawyers. Lawyer Jia Xiuping of Beijing Huicheng's Shanghai office, commenting on the ruling, set out the rule of thumb it turned on: travel that consumes rest hours is effectively working time, and a schedule that strips rest from an overnight trip is unreasonable — an employee may refuse it. The counter-rule matters too: refusing reasonable travel, after warnings, is still grounds for lawful dismissal.
Arbitration also implied what the company owed: since the termination was unlawful, Qu is entitled to the remedies that follow. For everyone else watching, the ruling is narrower but real — a company can choose the cheap ticket, but it cannot make the overnight seat itself the punishment.