Recent legislation is clearly more favorable to employees in terms of paid leave. Walter France's Social working group explains practical applications for companies and their employees.
The European Union requires all Member States to take “the necessary measures to ensure that every worker benefits from paid annual leave of at least four weeks, in accordance with the conditions of obtaining and granting provided for by national legislation and/or practices”. The Court of Justice of the European Union in 2012 had already sanctioned the French State due to the non-compliance of its national law with the European directive. otherwise, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the Union provides in particular that every worker has the right to daily and weekly rest periods, as well as an annual period of paid leave. This text is one of the main bases on which the Court of Cassation relied to rule out the application of the provisions of French law. The provisions challenged in the decisions were as follows: : according to French law, an employee suffering from a non-occupational illness could not acquire days of paid leave during the time of his work stoppage. otherwise, the acquisition of paid leave was to be limited to a single year of suspension of the employment contract in the event of a work accident or occupational illness. Finally, the starting point of the limitation period for paid vacation compensation was also called into question..
The judgment of the Court of Cassation
The Court of Cassation definitively put an end to these non-compliances by now considering that employees suffering from an illness or victims of an accident, of any kind (professional or not), must acquire paid leave rights by including in their calculation the period during which they were unable to work — according to European Union law, the work stoppage being independent of the will of the employee, it cannot have an impact on the calculation of paid leave rights. In the event of a work accident or occupational illness, compensation for paid leave cannot be limited to one year, and the employee must be able to benefit from a right to paid leave covering the entirety of their work stoppage.
Limitation period
If paid leave rights are assimilated to salary claims and are prescribed three years from the expiration of the period during which they should have been taken, the Court of Cassation restricted the possibility for the employer to rely on the limitation period in this area. The prescription of the right to paid leave only begins to run when the employer has put his employee in a position to exercise it in good time.. The employer, faced with a request for a leave recall, can therefore only invoke the three-year limitation period if it can justify having carried out the due diligence required of it to enable the employee to take their leave. What, by definition, seems difficult, or even impossible for the past.
What consequences for businesses ?
All companies covered by French labor law are affected by these decisions and have had to, Normally, comply with it from the last quarter of 2023. For the past, human resources departments risk being confronted with requests for regularization from employees or former employees who have seen their right to annual leave limited due to sick leave or work accident leave greater than one year. We can also wonder about the particular impact of these decisions in professions for which paid leave is managed and shared through a fund system.. A recent “news flash” from the construction weather leave fund on the subject announces that “the decision is the subject of numerous analyzes by legal professionals in general and experts from the CIBTP network in particular., in conjunction with public authorities and professional organizations” and explains “that as it stands, the concrete effects and methods of application of these changes to the legal regime are currently being evaluated”.
A financial cost to assess
Pending new decisions from the Court of Cassation and a hypothetical but strongly desired intervention from the executive or professional branches (November 30, 2023, Ms. Élisabeth Borne had announced that French law would be brought into compliance by the end of the first quarter of 2024., but by reducing “the impact for businesses as much as possible”) there remain a large number of questions which will not fail to occupy companies and practitioners, even social courts, in the coming months. In any case, these judgments of great practical importance can represent a significant financial cost for companies which it may be wise to evaluate without delay.
