Wow.
Only 4% of CDI terminations are contested on prud'homme in France, the rest cause no problem at all.
To rephrase: 96% of CDI terminations go on without any problem in France.
Of these 4%, in 75% the employee wins at least something which mean the employer made zero attempt at negociation and did not follow basic rules.
That leaves 1% of all CDI terminations that end in an abusive recourse by the employee.
Now if you take CDI terminations because of economic conditions, only 3% get to prud'homme.
To rephrase it: 97% of CDI terminations because of economic conditions go on without problems in France. Even higher than general terminations.
And of course you can hire a contractor, no one oblige you to hire an employee. If you consider an employee, that's because you choose it and felt it was an advantage to have an employee in CDI against the "flexibility" of a contractor. Again it's your call here, if you don't want CDI, by all means get a contractor.
About trends, Prud'homme recourses have gone down 7% over the past 10 years in the context of more recourse to justice in the french society.
Data and references available in the comments here:
http://ew-econ.typepad.fr/mon_weblog/2007/03/questions_ouver.html
If a business is having financial difficulties, it's probably not too difficult to prove it and therefore lay off staff, and the employee seems to understand that his chances in court are slim. The blog confirms that.
The personal motives are indeed the soft spot, as the law doesn't spell out what constitutes a serious and real motive for laying someone off. That's the employee who spends a bit too much time surfing or chatting or who is not sufficiently friendly to customers etc., but who is not committing any serious error. If an employer has a risk of 20% for finding himself in court if laying off someone like that, he has all interest in minimising that risk. The employer cannot get his lawyer paid by legal aid as the employee can in some cases, so either the legal fees come straight out of his pocket, or he needs to pay for a legal insurance (something that I any doubtless many others cannot afford). To avoid that risk, the only way today seems to not hire anyone on a CDI.
Yes, I can subcontract, and that's what I currently do when there is a need. It works well for translation. It may not work so well in other cases, not least because subcontracting is illegal in cases where the subcontractor would work on site as if he were an employee ("delit de marchandage"), since in the eyes of the employment code the subcontractor is taking the place of an employee. So, yes, it's a solution in certain cases, not in others. Some public companies like the SNCF quite happily breach this part of the employment code.
I think one of the problems in corporate-culture France is that the employer is traditionally considered to be in the position of strength, while the opposite is considered to be the case for the employee. The culture has become so that the employee thinks he has all the rights. That equation is often not true in smaller businesses, and by the courts and rules applying rules as if the small business were in the position of strength, the business actually becomes the weak part. Hence, many such businesses don't hire anyone on CDIs. The result can be read in the unemployment statistics.
Without having read the entire blog, it seems balanced though.
The figures you have taken out of that blog are not representative.
It's just incredible.
"The result can be read in the unemployment statistics."
Which are representative of course.
Well, thanks for the discussion anyway.
I did not mean to say that the figures themselves are not representative.
Just looked that up on Wikipedia. Wow.
La jurisprudence établit qu'il y a délit de marchandage notamment dans les cas suivants : le personnel sous-traité travaille pour un seul client depuis plusieurs années ; le personnel sous-traité reçoit ses instructions de l'encadrement du client ; le client contrôle lui-même le suivi, définit les tâches et les lieux d'exécution ; le personnel exécute la totalité de sa mission dans les locaux du client, et est soumis à des horaires identiques à ceux du personnel du client ; le client fournit les matériaux, les pièces de rechange, met à disposition son outillage, ses véhicules, des locaux lui appartenant, ses documents, etc. la rémunération du sous-traitant était calculée au temps passé par son personnel.
Get nailed, and you risk 1-2 years imprisonment and/or a $40,000 fine, with or without a ban on using subcontractors for two to ten years.
So if you don't want CDI, hiring subcontractors is not as simple as all that. Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
self-employed subcontractors aren't really forbidden... Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
in the U.S., i have worked as a self-employed independent contractor (software developer), at times under all five of these conditions simultaneously (except perhaps the last, and even then it depends on how you define temps passé):
le personnel sous-traité travaille pour un seul client depuis plusieurs années ; le personnel sous-traité reçoit ses instructions de l'encadrement du client ; le client contrôle lui-même le suivi, définit les tâches et les lieux d'exécution ; le personnel exécute la totalité de sa mission dans les locaux du client, et est soumis à des horaires identiques à ceux du personnel du client ; le client fournit les matériaux, les pièces de rechange, met à disposition son outillage, ses véhicules, des locaux lui appartenant, ses documents, etc. la rémunération du sous-traitant était calculée au temps passé par son personnel.
Are you saying that this in fact is perfectly legal despite what the Wikipedia entry says? Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
I'm not saying that it is perfectly, 100% legal, but that to that point it's a situation that is accepted by the prud'hommes. (and it's not the only way to provide flexibility for the employer : CDD, interim (temp jobs), and partial employment with lot of overtime (think 10 hours weekly contract, with overtime when needed) are other forms of flexibility. Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
