Beijing court uses WeChat to solve labor disputes

A Beijing court has begun solving labor disputes via social media, aiming to save judges' time and improve work efficiency, Beijing Youth Daily reported on Thursday.

Beijing No 2 Intermediate People's Court has created a public WeChat account to mediate labor disputes, the report said.

Wang Dong, director of the labor dispute department under the court, told the paper that judges are too busy to ask litigants to go to court for mediation.

"We filed more than 1,400 labor disputes over the past six months of this year, but we only have 11 judges. It was really a big workload,"the paper quoted Wang as saying.

Wang said the court sometimes has difficulty in contacting litigants, which causes delays in cases, so officials decided to use WeChat to speed up the process.

"We put people with willingness to solve their labor disputes via mediation in a WeChat group and then give them mediating means, asking them to negotiate with each other,"the paper quoted Wang as saying.

He said litigants who reach an agreement on WeChat must go to the court to sign a mediation paper, according to the report.

This marks the first time that Beijing courts have used social media to solve disputes, the report said.