Commissioned Employee? Is this legal for a cram school to avoid paying benefits

The short answer is no.

The medium answer is no, but it’s not criminal either (at least probably not in a way you can prove).

The long answer is complicated. The administrative authorities (local labor department, BLI, any other department/agency taking an interest, and the administrative courts if it gets to that) will most likely agree, assuming there’s nothing unusual about this job aside from the contract, that you are both an employee and a worker (technically not the same thing), but they don’t have jurisdiction over every aspect of your relationship with your employer, so in some situations your employer could stiff you and leave you with no recourse but to file a civil suit, and the civil courts don’t always agree with the administrative courts, so they might decide you’re only a mandatary (or what would be called an independent contractor in a common law country).

A prominent example in recent years is Nanshan Insurance. The Supreme Court and Supreme Administrative Court disagreed about whether Nanshan’s brokers were workers (leaving aside the question of whether they were employees), and the case (actually several cases involving thousands of brokers) was appealed to the Council of Grand Justices (aka the “constitutional court”), which waxed poetic about the nature of private law and concluded with, basically, due to a technicality we actually have no obligation to resolve this disagreement between the courts. Have a nice day! So the brokers simultaneously are and are not workers.

Tl/dr: just find another job. :slight_smile:

(If you’ve been working there for a while, it may be worthwhile to do an Art. 14 termination and demand severance pay, with a little help from the labor department. We have had several threads about that.)

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