Fixed term employment contracts included. Directive 98/59 sets out the criteria for the number of workers to be made redundant and for the size of the business required to trigger a collective redundancy procedure (at least 10 employees in undertaking of between 20-99 staff, at least 10% of staff in undertakings employing between 100-299, etc.). A Spanish judge intent on making waves put this question to the CJEU for a preliminary ruling: because the Directive specifically provides that when contracts cease, because they have reached their expiry date, then they are not eligible in the calculations for triggering the collective redundancy procedure, does that then mean that workers on fixed term employment contracts should be included in the overall staff count (itself another one of the criteria)?
EU: the CJEU may restrict governments’ capacity to exclude specific termination of employment contracts from collective redundancy procedures
The CJEU has to rule if employees on fixed term employment contracts should be included in the calculations used to determine the number of workers in an undertaking as pertaining to Directive 98/59 on collective redundancies. In an opinion handed down on 03 September, Julianne Kokott, Advocate General, recommended the Court to include this employee category and it would be surprising if the CJEU decides to exclude it. However one of two other questions raised for preliminary ruling in the original Spanish case may in fact call into question certain national measures (initially in Spain but also in France on the subject of agreements geared to maintaining employment) that allow companies to exclude from calculations for collective redundancy procedures any terminations of employment relationships resulting from employees rejecting changes made to their contracts by their employers for economic reasons.
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