A college graduate from the central province of Anhui has successfully filed what is believed to be China’s first HIV employment discrimination lawsuit. The plaintiff, known by his pseudonym Xiao Wu, filed an anti-discrimination lawsuit in the Yingjiang District Court in Anqing on 26 August after the Anqing education department denied him a teaching position because he was HIV positive. The court formally accepted the case on Monday August 30.

A retired miner from Sichuan with stage-three pneumoconiosis, who has been seeking occupational illness compensation from his former employer for the past three years, has finally been awarded 136,000 yuan in a court mediated settlement Xiao Huazhong had been seeking 190,000 yuan, the amount he should be legally entitled to, but accepted the lower award because he is currently seriously ill in hospital, has already spent his entire life savings of around 80,000 yuan on medical care, and is faced with additional hospital bills of several hundred yuan a day.

Twenty-one flight attendants were on 9 March awarded a total of one million yuan in compensation after their monthly pay was slashed from 10,000 yuan to just 800 yuan. A Beijing court found that Xinhua Airlines, a Beijing-based subsidiary of Hainan Airlines, had no legal grounds for cutting the cabin crew’s salaries in September 2008 and ordered it to make up the shortfall in wages

Hotel employee, Zhu Peifang was summarily dismissed after 24 years of service, with no compensation, no year-end bonus and no wages for her work the previous month. With the help of CLB, Zhu was reinstated and paid six month’s wages in arrears.

A 25 year-old university graduate with Hepatitis B has, for the first time in China, successfully sued a hospital for violating his right to privacy after it gave the results of his blood test to a prospective employer.

Liu Hanhuang, a 26 year-old migrant worker from Guizhou who dropped out of school after graduating primary school was on 2 November sentenced to death (suspended for two years) and ordered to pay more than 1.2 million yuan in compensation for murdering two managers, and severely injuring a third, at a Dongguan factory in June.

A middle-aged pharmacist at a hospital in central China has been awarded 118,000 yuan in compensation after being savagely beaten by the hospital’s director. Chen Yanqun suffered severe physical and psychological injuries when she was beaten around the head and body by Zheng Weibin, the director of Longtou Hospital in Chenggu county, Shaanxi, on 24 October 2008.

A court in Chengdu has taken the highly unusual step of sanctioning a company for dismissing an employee without informing the trade union, as required by law, the Chengdu Commercial Daily (成都商报) reported on 9 October. The Jinjiang District People’s Court ordered a Chengdu electrical appliance company to pay the employee, a Ms Gao, 19,600 yuan in “double compensation” (双倍赔偿金) – that is twice the amount of economic compensation the employee would normally be entitled to if dismissed in accordance with the Labour Contract Law.

BEIJING - CHINA will stop mandatory hepatitis B tests for employees joining new companies and students enrolling in schools, state media said on Sunday, after a court ruled the tests were illegal discrimination. Deng Haihua, deputy director of the health ministry's general office, said the government would soon issue instructions to stop the practice, which is currently a requirement, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

On 23 May 2008, a Beijing district court awarded Gao Yiming nearly 20,000 yuan in compensation after he was refused employment at a Beijing technology company on the grounds that he was carrying the Hepatitis B virus (HBV). This was the first time a HBV discrimination case had been successfully litigated in China. Earlier cases had been successfully concluded through court ordered mediation or through private agreements between the plaintiff and defendant.