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Contracting several types of work may backfire on employers

The Labour Code gives employers several tools to make the relationships with their employees more flexible. The possibility of contracting more than one type of work in a single employment contract is one of them. In particular, this is practical for employers who assign various work tasks beyond the scope of a single job to their employees. However, as the Supreme Administrative Court recently emphasised, there are some disadvantages to this solution.

The case in question involved a typical labour-law dispute – the validity of a termination of employment. Under an employment contract, an employee had worked as a laboratory technician and as a driver at the same time. During the term of the employment contract, she ceased to meet the qualification requirements to carry out the work of a laboratory technician. The employer therefore gave her a termination notice on the grounds of her failing to meet the requirements stipulated by legal regulation for carrying out the contracted work. The employee considered the termination unlawful and challenged its validity in court: she argued that she was still meeting all required criteria for working as a driver. In contrast, the employer emphasised that throughout her employment the employee had primarily worked as a laboratory technician and had only worked as a driver sometimes when substituting for her colleagues.

The crucial question was whether it had been possible to terminate the employee’s employment on the grounds of a failure to meet stipulated prerequisites even when such grounds for termination only concerned one of several contracted types of work. According to the SAC, this was a breach of law: the employer could still have assigned work to the employee under the existing employment contract; the driver job was not affected by the failure to meet the prerequisites. The court deemed irrelevant that the employee had only carried out the work sporadically. Therefore, the court declared the termination invalid.

The employer probably could have prevented the unfavourable ruling as employers can regulate individual job contents in their internal policies. If the employee had primarily worked as a laboratory technician and if the tasks she carried out as a driver closely related to her laboratory work (for instance involved only transporting, from time to time, laboratory samples for a short distance, between the clients and the laboratory), the job description of the laboratory job could have contained also this activity. Then it would have been sufficient to state only the laboratory technician job in the employment contract, and the termination could have held up in court. In short, professionally drafted policies and procedures may help employers win a good many disputes.