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French Employment Law - Dismissals under
French Law
Under French statute, an employee in France is never employed 'at will', it is therefore not possible for an employer to dismiss an individual, or otherwise bring his or her contract of employment to an end, without being able to show proof of one or more 'motifs réels et sérieux' i.e. genuine and substantive grounds for such a termination.
Moreover, the procedure for bringing about the end of the contract of employment is very formal and, for the most part, it is set down in great detail in the codified statute known, in French, as the Code du Travail (CdT).
Failure to comply precisely with these statutory provisions, as well as those flowing from case law, could in certain circumstances lead to the whole of the dismal procedure being held to be invalid and thus possible reinstatement of, or more likely an award of damages to, the employee.
To give an example of the formal nature of the dismissal procedure, it is a requirement that any individual dismissal should be preceded by a preliminary interview with the employee, to which he or she is usually summoned by a recorded delivery letter sent to his or her home address.
The letter in question must be shown to have reached the employee a certain number of working days prior to the formal interview; failing which the interview either may not take place or perhaps may be held to be void and thus invalidate any subsequent steps taken.
This is but one example aimed at providing an idea of the formal nature of the many different procedural constraints with which it is necessary to comply.
The genuine and substantive grounds for bringing a French contract of employment to an end may be considered under two different and general heads, and a considerably different procedural route would be followed for each.
The two heads are dismissal on grounds of conduct or performance on the one hand, and dismissal on economic grounds on the other.
The two heads in question are subject to very different criteria and procedure. Great care indeed should be taken not to confuse them and it would always be recommend that precise planning should be carried out prior to starting either
procedure.
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