A mother breastfeeds her baby with the support of her husband at a hospital in Vietnam. Photo: Courtesy of Alive and Thrive

An employee in Shanghai was recently found to have been forced by her company to write a handwritten sales summary every day during her maternity leave, sparking outrage online after a letter from the company's human resources department went viral. The company addressed the situation on Tuesday, saying it did mishandle the issue due to its institutional shortcomings and has since communicated with the employee and reinstated her original position before further investigation is conducted into the matter, Shangyou News reported.  

According to the letter, the employee from Banmoo, a local furniture company, was demanded to write a daily sales summery containing at least 600 Chinese characters every hour. What's more, she would be punished for writing incorrect characters with a 50-yuan ($7.22) fine for one mistake. Also, she would be fined 100 yuan for each sentence that was repeated. She was forced to hand in her work every day and would be fined 500 yuan for lateness or forgetting the task.

In the letter, the human resource specialist "warmly reminded" their employee that, upon considering her lactating condition, the summary had to be handwritten. 

The content of the letter sparked outrage among Chinese web users on China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo. "Such a company should go bankrupt," one netizen commented. "The company is blatantly forcing the employee to quit," another said. 

A member of Shanghai's medical insurance hotline told the Global Times on Tuesday that, in principle, the employee's salary during her maternity leave should be paid through local maternity insurance; that is, if the employee signed up for the local social insurance. Her company can then pay the rest of her salary to ensure it remains the same as the average salary of the company's employees. If the employee in question did not sign up for the insurance plan, however, the company has to pay her salary based on the average salary of the company. 

"It is a legal right for employees on maternity leave to receive salaries or subsidies without working normally. So, the task assigned to the employee in Shanghai is absolutely illegal," Liang Chen, an attorney from Zhongwen Law Firm, told the Global Times on Tuesday. 

Besides, the company has no right to punish the employee in this way, Liang noted. Only if the employee's misbehaviors caused actual losses to the company, can they ask the employee to provide monetary compensation. 

A member of the Shanghai Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau told the Global Times on Tuesday that the employee involved in the dispute can submit issues of labor arbitration and litigation to the relevant authority to safeguard her legitimate rights and interests.