A Chongqing woman removed from 845 work chats and paid only 55 yuan won a labor dispute. The court ordered 53,491 yuan in compensation for unpaid wages, overtime, and leave.
Tags:A Chinese woman’s six-year career at a company in Chongqing ended after she said management gradually cut her off from her job — removing her computer, giving her no work and eventually excluding her from hundreds of workplace chat groups.
Now, after nearly a year of legal proceedings, she has won most of her claims against her former employer.
The woman, identified as Xiao Gu, joined the company in June 2019 and worked there for more than six years. The conflict reportedly began in 2025, although the exact reason for the company's subsequent treatment of her remains unclear.
Xiao Gu believes it may have been connected to several disagreements with management. She recalled refusing some overtime requests and later working the overtime anyway. She also had a disagreement with her boss after expressing her views about changes to the company's employee performance-evaluation system. But she emphasized that she could not be certain these incidents were the cause. The company never formally told her why its attitude toward her had changed.
In September 2025, her working conditions began to deteriorate.
Her computer was taken away and she stopped receiving work assignments. A surveillance camera was also reportedly directed toward her workstation. At the same time, she was gradually removed from workplace communication groups.
By the end of the process, she said she had been excluded from 845 work-related chat groups.
screenshot from Tencent News
Yet she did not immediately leave.
Instead, Xiao Gu continued showing up at the office and clocking in every day. With no tasks to complete, she spent almost a month sitting at her workstation. She repeatedly asked her supervisors whether there was any work she could do, but said she received no response.
The company later asked her to stay home for three days. She refused because she was worried that staying away from the office could allow the company to accuse her of being absent.
Eventually, she decided that remaining in the position was no longer realistic and resigned on October 14, 2025. Her final payment was only 55 yuan (about US$8) for roughly half a month of work.
screenshot from Tencent News
Instead of accepting the situation, Xiao Gu filed a labor dispute claim. She sought unpaid wages, overtime compensation, payment for unused annual leave and economic compensation connected to the end of her employment.
The company disputed her claims and also made its own allegations, including that she had failed to properly hand over her work after leaving.
In December 2025, a labor arbitration commission supported most of Xiao Gu's claims and confirmed that an employment relationship had existed between the two sides from June 17, 2019, to October 14, 2025.
The company challenged the decision in court. A first-instance court again ruled largely in Xiao Gu's favor, ordering the company to pay unpaid wages, overtime compensation, unused annual-leave compensation and 53,491.56 yuan in economic compensation.
screenshot from Tencent News
The company appealed. On August 21, 2026, the second-instance court issued its final ruling. It largely upheld the earlier decision while adjusting several amounts. The company was ultimately required to pay the compensation recognized by the final judgment.
The company paid the court-ordered amount on August 27.
However, Xiao Gu says she is still pursuing another issue: she believes the company failed to make social-insurance contributions for six months and did not fully base some contributions on her actual salary.
During the legal battle, she also found an unexpected way to tell her story. She began writing songs about her experience and posting them online. One video described receiving only 55 yuan for her final half-month of work and being removed from 845 workplace groups. The videos attracted millions of views, with one early post reportedly receiving more than 5.6 million views.
She did not publicly identify the company or the people involved, but said some of her videos were repeatedly reported.
For Xiao Gu, the songs became a way of documenting a workplace conflict that she says was never properly explained to her.
The court battle may have settled most of the financial dispute, but the central question remains: what caused the company to push her out in the first place?
Source:
Editor:Vivi G
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