employment contracts

Subscribe to employment contracts

The “Act on Proof of the Existence of an Employment Relationship” (Nachweisgesetz – NachwG) requires employers to set out the essential contractual terms of the employment in writing to their employees. The German legislature has now passed an amendment to the Nachweisgesetz, which comes into force on August 1, 2022, and has the effect of transposing the EU Directive (2019/1152) on Transparent and Foreseeable Working Conditions (the Directive) into national law. Accordingly, employers will be required to provide employees with more comprehensive information than before, either as part of the employment contract or in separate documentation. Failure to comply with the new requirements, can lead to fines for the employers. In this post, we summarize the most important legal effect of the amendments.

Regularly agreed in employment contracts, exclusion clauses shorten the statutory limitation period for claims arising in the employment relationship and ensure certainty between employer and employee especially with regards to claims that are years old. In a remarkable decision the German Federal Labour Court (BAG, 26.11.2020 – ref. 8 AZR 58/20) has fundamentally changed the case law with regard to the drafting of these clauses. A large number of the exclusion clauses used in practice are now likely to be ineffective.

As employers prepare for the cautious reopening of the economy and the gradual return to the physical workplace, questions on altering the terms of an existing employment agreement could certainly arise for a number of legitimate reasons.

Specifically, employers often ask under what circumstances they can make changes to existing employment agreements. Commonly, employers face…

Technology is ever-changing, and while in the past evidence of an employee’s misconduct was based mainly on “physical” witnesses and observations, employers might now be tempted to use data obtained through social media as evidence against their employees.

At the present time the French Supreme Court has not had many occasions to clarify the manner in which evidence obtained by French employers through the Facebook website (and more particularly on the “wall” of an individual) should be treated by the courts.