HK protest protection

What are your responsibilities as an employer if your workers attend a protest rally? What if they are injured somehow on their way to work? Are you liable? We asked an expert on Hong Kong employment law, Lewis Silkin Hong Kong’s managing partner Kathryn Weaver, about all the angles you need to have covered during this summer of unrest

Asia Business Law Journal: Can you outline some of the key responsibilities that Hong Kong employers need to consider during the current unrest and protests?

Weaver: There’s a number of considerations for employers during this period of unrest. The first one should be in relation to employee safety. Employers in Hong Kong have an obligation to ensure a safe workplace for their employees, and that means coming into and exiting the building as well.

Where there is any kind of protest that might turn volatile, employers should be thinking about what arrangements they would have in place to ensure the safety of their employees. That could mean asking them to work from home, if that’s a possibility, or asking them not to come in.

If that’s not a possibility, which is the case with some industries such as F&B, retail and hospitality, where it’s very difficult for those individuals to work from home, you might ask them just not to come in. If they’re already in the workplace you need to make sure they have the possibility to leave as quickly as possible to ensure they get home and they’re safe.

So, businesses should have in place a business contingency plan that they then implement in these circumstances. If they don’t, for whatever reason, and an employee is injured, even if that’s on the way into work or exiting work, then that individual could bring a claim against the employer, and there could be compensation that needs to be paid in these circumstances. That’s the first thing to think about, employee safety, which I think is paramount in a lot of employers’ minds.

The second thing to think about is what do employers do where employees want to take time off to protest or to strike? Now this has been happening in a variety of ways. Employees have been applying for annual leave to go on the protest or to strike, and if they’ve done that in accordance with the employer’s rules, in good time, and they’ve been granted the leave; then the employees can do whatever they want during their time off, as long as their actions don’t do anything that will bring the company into disrepute, or would affect the employee’s ability to carry out their duties going forward.

These kinds of activities might be illegal assembly, rioting, criminal damage, assaulting a police officer or misusing personal data of those people participating in the protests themselves, or the police officers. If they do those things, the employer could take action against that individual, even if they’ve taken time off to do the strike or protest, or whatever the activity is. So, there could be disciplinary consequences for that.