Leading commentary and perspectives on employment and labor law
The legal background
Under French employment law, the provision of a probationary period in an employment contract entitles the employer to terminate the contract without being required to follow a dismissal procedure or to justify the termination on real and serious grounds. However, the termination of an employment contract during a probationary period must be …
The impact of the use of social media in the workplace has regularly given rise to controversies and debates as how this subject is to be handled by a company’s management. The current state of employment law is still not entirely settled in this respect. It is however possible to provide some guidance on the …
The legal context
French employment law strictly prohibits situations of moral harassment in the workplace, the employer being required to take all necessary measures to prevent such situations from occurring. The employer can, for example, be held liable if acts of moral harassment actually take place, as the employer can then be held to have …
As a preliminary comment, it should be observed that disabled employees who carry out their professional activity in a normal working environment are considered as full-fledged employees and thus benefit from the same rights as any employee. Moreover, and in any event, an employee is never obliged to disclose his/her disability situation to his/her employer.…
The legal background
An employment contract is above all a contract which is governed and subject to general rules applicable to any agreement entered into by two or more parties. In particular, contract law generally allows the parties to agree on the termination of the contract by which they are bound. Drawing the consequences from …
The legal background
The issue of alcohol consumption in the workplace is a common concern for any employer wishing to protect its employees’ health and safety at work. From a legal perspective, this can result in potential risks in terms of criminal and civil liability, particularly with regard to the employer’s duty of care toward …
As previously commented in one of our articles, French case law has subjected to increasingly strict scrutiny employers using “forfait jours”, i.e. a specific method of working time for autonomous executives (whose working time is calculated as a number of days worked over the year rather than a number of hours per week).…
The issue of reconciling work and personal life has become a growing concern in France and resulted in particular in the negotiation of a nation-wide inter-sectoral agreement relating to the quality of working life in 2013. In this context, the issue of flexible working raises, among other things, the question of whether employees benefit from…
The legal background
Under French employment law, pregnant employees enjoy particularly strong protection from dismissal — dismissal of pregnant employees is prohibited from the moment the employee is medically certified as being pregnant, except in the two following circumstances: gross misconduct on the part of the employee or impossibility to maintain the employment contract for…
The legal background
Under French employment law, employees’ representatives benefit from specific protection against dismissal. As a result, an employer contemplating the termination of the employment contract of such a protected employee must first obtain the prior authorization of the labor inspectorate. However, the employer is entitled to suspend the employee’s employment contract temporarily pending …
