A Nanjing Court Fined a Company ¥110,000 for Firing an Engineer Over Phone Glances
Surveillance-driven terminations are spreading globally as remote and hybrid work expands. This ruling establishes that a company must prove an action harmed work, not just that it looked idle on camera — a standard that directly challenges the growing practice of algorithmic productivity policing.
A Nanjing-based tech company terminated engineer Lin after compiling surveillance footage of 14 incidents: leaving his seat for nine minutes, talking to a colleague for four, starting his computer eight minutes late, glancing at his phone, and leaving three minutes early. Lin argued his phone was a work tool for competitive research and daily reporting. Both the first-instance and appellate courts rejected the company’s case, ruling that the firm failed to prove the actions were non-work-related or rose to the level of serious misconduct.
The ruling exposes a management pathology: when a company assigns no concrete tasks — only vague research and daily reports — yet demands employees constantly appear busy, any ordinary behavior can be recast as a disciplinary offense. The court did not endorse slacking off; it rejected the logic that a surveillance clip alone can define an employee’s conduct as a fireable violation.
Lin’s daily work reports proved decisive. The case underscores that when tasks are ambiguous, the paper trail — emails, group messages, reports — becomes the only shield against a company that substitutes monitoring for actual management.
The ruling draws a hard line between observing a behavior and proving it damaged work — a distinction many performance-management systems erase.
When a company provides no measurable deliverables, it shifts from managing output to policing posture, which punishes efficiency and rewards performative busyness.
The case shows that a daily reporting habit, often dismissed as bureaucratic overhead, can become the decisive piece of evidence in a labor dispute.
The court’s logic implies that if a company cannot articulate what ‘working’ looks like for a role, it forfeits the right to declare someone not working based on camera footage alone.