Pursuant to the labour law, an Employer must ensure that the overtime hours of any Employee are as follows[1]:
- no more than 50% of normal working hours/day, in case of applying weekly working regulations, the total number of normal working hours and overtime must not exceed 12 hours/ day;
- no more than 12 hours/day in case of overtime working on public holidays, Tet holidays and weekends;
- not exceeding 30 hours/month; and
- not exceeding 200 hours/year, for some special cases stipulated by the Government, not exceeding 300 hours/year.
Accordingly, the conditions on overtime hours must be obeyed by Employers at the same time. Failure to comply with any of the said conditions is a violation of labour law on overtime working. For example, an Employee’s daily working time is 08 hours. When requesting an Employee to work overtime, any Employer must ensure that the overtime hours of such Employee does not exceed 04 hours/ day and the total number of overtime hours in the same month must not exceed 30 hours.
In cases where Employees are mobilised to work overtime in excess of the prescribed number of hours, Employers may be subject to a fine of between 50,000,000 and VND 100,000,000 and suspended from one month to three months[2]. Rather than imposing penalty levels, the competent authority will rely on the said penalty levels and additional sanctions for dealing with in case of finding that Employers have breached the regulation on overtime working.
With
regard to the protection of Employees’ health after overtime, it is provided by
law that Employers must arrange compensatory leave for Employees to take after
each overtime work of up to 7 consecutive days/month. In the event that it is
impossible to arrange full compensatory leave, overtime salary must be paid in
accordance with Article 97 of the Labor Code[3]. Apart from the forms of
compensatory leave and overtime salary as aforesaid, the labour law does not
cover any other regulation that Employers must take Employees to a medical
consultation after a period of continuous overtime. Instead, Employers are only
required to hold annual health checks for Employees[4]. However, in order to
ensure the health of Employees after each period of overtime working, labour
law encourages Employers to hold a medical check-up for Employees who have
worked overtime[5].
[1]Article 106.2 Labor Code and Article 4.1 Decree 45/2013/NĐ-CP dated 10/5/2013
[2]Articles 14.4 and 14.5 Decree 95/2013/NĐ-CP dated 22/08/2013 as amended and supplemented by Decree 88/2015/NĐ-CP dated 07/10/2015
[3]Article 106.2 (c) Labor Code and Article 4.3 Decree 45/2013/NĐ-CP dated 10/5/2013
[4]Article 152.2 Labor Code
[5]Article 4.1 Labor Code