Companies subject to the SO-called SYNTEC collective agreement should welcome a recent decision by the Court of Cassation to end trial periods. For a long time, a number of collective agreements contained specific rules for the extension and termination of the trial period. The Court of Cassation had established the principle that, in the absence of an express indication in the applicable collective agreement, the duration of the period of notice provided for in that agreement must not run within the trial period or expire before the expiry of that period (Arbeitskammer der Cour de cassation, 31 October 1989, Nos. 86-43.894 and 11 October 2000, No. 98-45.170). These trial periods may be extended if the extension is approved by a sectoral collective agreement and the possibility of renewal is expressly provided for in the employment contract. In case of extension, the trial period for each of the above categories may not exceed 4, 6 or 8 months (Article L.1221-21 of the French Labour Code). The question of the effective termination of the contract was not resolved with certainty, as the Labour Division of the Court of Cassation relied solely on the fact that the worker had been exempted from all activity in order to assess the lawfulness of the dismissal. Could companies assume that the employment contract ends at the latest at the end of the trial period and pay only compensation for the “notice period” provided for in the applicable collective agreement that goes beyond the “notice period” provided for by law, which would have the effect of depriving the worker of certain rights, or should they instead regard this period as the notice period applicable to dismissals? The question remains open. The Labour Chamber of the Court of Cassation took care to put the words “notice period” in quotation marks.

In deciding that the company was entitled to extend the duration of the employment contract – provided that this contract was not processed after the end of the trial period – the Labour Chamber of the Court of Cassation seemed to distinguish between the “notice period” provided for by law and the notice periods provided for in collective agreements. To complete our article of May 2, www.employmentlawworldview.com/french-disconnection-2-the-next-instalment/, you will find below a summary of recent changes, as well as the French employers` measures should take now to move with the new addendum. The end of the probationary period has, of course, given rise to various types of litigation. The Labour Chamber of the Court of Cassation had already been asked to decide how to apply the provisions of the collective agreements in this regard. On April 11, 2014, we published an alert for a new addendum to the SYNTEC National Collective Agreement in France. This shift led to wide global media coverage, including reports that the deal “affected a million French workers,” that work had “become illegal” after 6 p.m..m and that French workers were now “forced to turn off their phones” after that time, etc. Despite the hype, this change does not affect all French workers, but only those who work under the aegis of syntec CBA and who are subject to a specific working time system known as the “fixed days agreement”. The employee considered that the exceeding of the maximum duration of the probationary period due to the length of the notice period provided for by the SYNTEC ACA constituted an unlawful dismissal without any real and serious basis. In addition, the amended CBA does not prevent employees from checking their emails after 6 p..m.

What it does is mean that during mandatory rest periods, employees must disconnect from remote work equipment and employers must ensure that their employees are able to disconnect. In the case commented, a difficulty arose because of the combination between the notice period provided for by law and the notice period provided for by the SYNTEC ACA. By using this website, you agree to security monitoring and auditing. For security reasons and to ensure that the public service remains accessible to users, this government computer system uses network traffic monitoring programs to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or modify information, or otherwise cause damage, including attempts to deny service to users. Note that this policy may change if the SEC manages to SEC.gov to ensure that the site operates efficiently and remains available to all users. In practice, the same rules applied to notice periods in the event of the end of the trial period as to notice periods in the event of termination. The call to amend the ABC SYNTEC was triggered by a decision of the French Supreme Court in April 2013 (see our reports in Be Global May and December 2013). In its decision, the Court held that the part of abc SYNTEC which authorises working time on the basis of a predefined number of days per year, rather than a weekly/monthly limit (e.B 35 hours/week), was not in conformity with EU law. In particular, the Court was concerned that the protection of workers` health and safety was included in the cost-benefit analysis (as they could “overload” excessively during these 218 days). As we noted in our alert, the new addendum does not mean that all French workers will have to “turn off” after 18 p.m., but it will have an impact on French employers and not only on those who are members of the two associations that have already signed the new addendum.

The notice period is in fact a period during which the employment contract continues to apply. Thus, not only does the employee continue to receive the remuneration, including benefits in kind, that would have been paid to him if he had worked during the notice period, but he also continues to benefit from the rights to which he is entitled by virtue of his activity as an employee of the company: death, disability and sickness insurance, compulsory profit-sharing scheme(s) and, where applicable, optional, works council, etc. For more information, see the SEC`s Privacy and Security Policy. Thank you for your interest in the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In fact, what the media reported as a change in the law is only an amendment to the syntec national collective agreement agreed on 1 April 2014 between the employers` and trade union organisations concerned. .