Denied Leave for Her Mother's Cancer Surgery, a Victoria's Secret Employee Leaves With Nothing
A Hangzhou store supervisor who asked for five days off to accompany her mother through cancer surgery was refused, had a spur-of-the-moment resignation 'instantly approved', and walked away this week with no negotiation and no compensation. Her account has made China's caregiving-versus-workplace squeeze the talk of the internet once again.
The ending, when it came, was pointedly anticlimactic. On October 15, the woman at the centre of one of China's most-followed workplace disputes posted that it was over: she had left Victoria's Secret, there had been no negotiation and no compensation, and she was done fighting. "I resigned because I didn't want to keep dragging this out — I have no energy left," she told the Xiaoxiang Morning Herald. "The company never intended to negotiate, and I certainly couldn't change anything."
How she arrived at that point is the reason the story refuses to die. The woman, a store supervisor at Victoria's Secret's Hangzhou Hubin Yintai in77 shop who joined in early July, asked on September 8 for five days of personal leave to accompany her mother through surgery. The store refused — a major campaign was coming and staffing was tight, and, she was told, employees with under three months' service do not get leave. Cornered, she mentioned resignation in a WeChat message; her manager approved it on the spot. Only after she complained up the chain did the company retroactively grant five days of paid leave.
What followed sharpened the outrage. On October 7 the regional manager messaged to schedule her for work the next day; she refused and made the resignation formal. Her old position, it turned out, had been listed while she was on leave — and a headhunter even contacted her about applying for it. "I asked which store," she said. "It was the same store, the same position I had held. They were recruiting for my own job over my head." A report of the exchange by Shandong Business Daily drew well over a thousand likes within hours.
The care squeeze behind the story
The dispute has resonated because it stages, in one shop-floor anecdote, the collision China's workforce keeps arguing about: rigid, narrowly interpreted rules on one side, and family care with no institutional backup on the other. China has no general statutory leave for caring for a sick parent, and short-tenure employees — often the most insecurely placed — are the most likely to be refused. As one widely shared commentary put it, "for working adults, the job is life's backing, but family is the only retreat" (工作是生活的底气，家人却是唯一的退路).
The brand angle has not been lost on readers, either: a company whose image runs on female empowerment declined to give a woman five days to sit with her mother in hospital. Her mother, she revealed, came out of open-chest surgery with a diagnosis of late-stage lung cancer and a rare mutation; the targeted drug prescribed afterwards costs more than 7,000 yuan a month — "I can't afford it", she said — and she was still waiting on a specialist consultation to map out treatment.
She keeps only one open account with her old employer: outstanding expense reimbursements, still awaiting settlement.