andrel <byt### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> - This week a national magazine (Vrij Nederland) ran an article making 
> the point was that public funded institutions (like universities and 
> hospitals) use all sort of tricks to circumvent laws and among other 
> things keep employees longer on temporary positions than legal.

I have noticed something similar here in Finland.

Finnish law has quite strict statutes protecting employees. Firstly,
you can't just fire an employee for no reason; the reason for firing
someone must be justified. (This means in practice that if someone
gets fired without good reason, they have a legal standing to sue
the employer.)

Secondly, even with a good and acceptable reason the employer must
give a notification to the employee three months in advance. (In
other words, unless the firm goes outright bankcrupt overnight or
there are other catastrophic reasons that the company cannot keep
paying an employee, they have to keep the employee for three more
months.) It's just not possible for an employer to go to an employee
and tell them "no need to come back tomorrow, you're fired" just like
that.

But of course many companies have found a way around both problems.
You see, rather than making permanent employment contracts, they make
extremely short temporary contracts that they just renew over and over
again for as long as the employee is hired. These temporary contracts
are typically for periods of three to even just one month.

You see, you can't fire somebody without good reason. However, there's
no law that forces an employer to renew a temporary contract. This means
that if the employer just wants to fire someone, they simply stop
renewing. They only have to keep paying the salary for the remaining
of the current contract (which is often much less than 3 months.)

There *is* a law that somewhat handles this, that says something along
the lines that temporary contracts can only be renewed a certain number
of times before the employee must be contracted on a permanent basis,
but seemingly this is hard to enforce and nobody does. (One would
think that labor unions would be all over this, but apparently not.
Although I suppose it depends on the labor union. Some are much, much
stronger than others.)

I have heard of people being employed for *years* with constantly-renewed
three-month and even two-month contracts, even though this ought to be
a legally questionable thing to do.

(At least these employees get all the same legal benefits as those who
have a permanent contract, eg. in terms of holydays and legal protection.
However, they have to live in constant fear that their employer one day
decides not to renew.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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