This newsletter summarizes five significant judicial decisions over recent months:
After being made redundant, an employee contested the termination of her employment contract.
The Court of Appeal ruled that her redundancy was justified. Indeed, the redundancy letter referred to the group’s economic difficulties, resulting in losses over the past 3 years, despite rising turnover.
This reasoning was rejected by the French Supreme court, holding that the Court of Appeal should have examined whether the increase in operating losses – the economic indicator used here – was significant. In the Court’s view, the economic difficulties relied upon were not sufficient to demonstrate the serious and lasting nature of operating losses in the business sector in question. The French Supreme Court will from now on require that the economic indicator relied upon in a redundancy situation – other than a drop in orders or turnover – is (i) serious, i.e. that there is a real increase, exclusive of any accounting or financial manipulation, and (ii) lasting, i.e. that the economic difficulties are not temporary, and it is foreseeable that they will be long lasting. In this case, the Court of Appeal would therefore have had to establish that these economic difficulties (losses) would continue beyond the three-year period.
A front-page article with the byline of veteran New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof is the latest poisonous example of what I call the NGO “halo effect.” Headlined “The Silence That Mee...