Germany: co-management boosted by presence of temporary workers (judgement)

On Tuesday 20 August, Germany’s Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof-BGH) published the reasons for its judgement handed down on 25 June 2019 (file n° Az. II ZB 21/18), when judges ruled in favour of the central works council of a company. It called for the application of laws on co-management and temporary work, under which a joint supervisory board must be set up when a company has more than 2,000 workers, including temporary staff. In their statement, the federal judges specify under which conditions the temporary workers can be counted as part of the workforce to go beyond the 2,000 employee threshold.
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The case, for which a last instance ruling was passed on 25 June by the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe, concerned the request of a central works council at a large SME, which sought to officially establish that the size of the company’s workforce had exceeded 2,000 for at least the period between January 2017 and March 2018, in other words for more than one year. According to the law on co-management of companies (Mitbestimmungsgesetz), firms are required to equally share positions on th

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