Employment laws in every country have anomalies that can catch employers off-guard because they do not seem to make sense—until you look under the surface. Three examples of this are from Italy, the Netherlands, and Australia, involving rules governing voluntary employment resignations in Italy to vacation leave accruals in the Netherlands to surprising redundancy pay entitlements in Australia. Here is a quick look at some fascinating features of these countries’ laws.
Italy
In Italy, employees who want to resign from their private-sector jobs must do so via a Ministry of Labor and Social Policy online portal using a unique identifier–otherwise, the resignations might not be legally recognized. Why all the bureaucracy around a resignation? This requirement was passed to address the problem of unscrupulous employers making employment candidates sign undated resignation letters to be kept on file along with their employment contracts. Having a pre-signed letter on file would give an employer the power to easily and cheaply discharge an employee at any time. This practice especially impacted women, who would sometimes be involuntarily “resigned” when they became pregnant. The resignation law originally became effective in 2007, but it was considered too cumbersome to implement and it has morphed over the years from chronologically numbered paper forms that expired after fifteen days, if not filed, to a new secure online process in 2016. Some courts have suggested that a...
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