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French Employment Law - Temporary contracts
of employment under French Law
The statutory position in France is that an open-ended contract of employment (contrat de travail à durée indéterminée or CDI) constitutes the absolute norm and that there is no employment ‘at will’.
Thus, at French Law, it is only possible to have recourse to temporary contracts of employment (contrat de travail à durée déterminée or CDD) in exceptional, and tightly regulated, circumstances, viz.
· In order to undertake a specific and temporary task within the scope of the limited circumstances as enumerated at article L.122-1-1 of the Code du travail (French codified statutes relating to Employment Law)
· In an employment agreement which comes within the scope of measures undertaken by the French State to encourage employment or to encourage vocational training.
Moreover, even in the above hypotheses, article L.122-3 of Code du travail set down further constraints, such as:
- the CDD or temporary contract of employment must be in writing, signed by both the salaried employee and the employer, and it must be handed to the employee within two days following his or her hiring; failure to carry out these steps could bring about criminal sanctions for the employer and the contract of employment would be held in this event to be open-ended and no longer of a temporary nature
- except in certain very limited cases (temporary replacement of an absent employee, seasonal work etc) the CDD must, as from its entry into force, set out the precise term or duration thereof
- the maximum term may not extend (including any renewal) beyond 9, 18 or 24 months dependant on the type of agreement envisaged
- the CDD comes automatically to an end at the expiry date set down in the agreement as initially signed
- except in the event of a specific agreement between the employee and the employer, the CDD may not normally be brought to an end prior to its term; other than through force majeure or pursuant to serious misconduct by the employee
- however, a relatively new statute allows the employee to bring a CDD to an early end in the event that he or she is able to justify that he or she has entered into an open-ended contract of employment
With the exception of certain rules relating to dismissal, the employee taken on under a CDD enjoys the same legal, contractual or customary advantages (specifically including remuneration) as those enjoyed by employees subject to an open-ended contract of employment.
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