The Court of Cassation judges, at the end of a legal soap opera, that the cap of prud’homal compensation does not tolerate no exception.
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Emmanuel Macron is winning a judicial guerrilla warfare which will have lasted more than four years. One of its social reforms as emblematic as disputed has just been validated by the Court of Cassation. In a judgment rendered Wednesday, May 11, the High Jurisdiction provides that the ceiling on prud’homal compensation is in accordance with the international commitments of France and that the application of this device does not tolerate any exceptions, as soon as it is Acts to repair a dismissal “without real and serious cause”. The employers welcomes such an outcome, which, according to him, avoids falling into a form of “arbitrary”.
The decision on Wednesday is part of the fierce fight that several employee organizations and the French lawyer union engaged against a flagship measure of September 2017 orders, whose aim was to flexible relations between employers and their staff. The incriminated arrangement is in the form of a scale, with minimum and maximum amounts. The judge is required to refer to it when he grants damages to an employee victim of an unjustified breach of his employment contract. This grid intends to give “visibility” to businesses and thus lift “the fear of hiring”.
The Council of State and the Constitutional Council had given their blessing to this mechanism. But several industrial tribunals have dismissed him, considering that he was contraveking the Convention N o 158 of the International Labor Organization (ILO). This text provides that the court of a country must be able to award an “adequate” compensation to the worker put to the door without valid reason.
Prud’homal judges considered that they were no longer able to properly compensate for this type of damage with the scale. They therefore freed themselves from it – by invoking his “discrepancy” – and ordered the payment of sums superior to the ceilings.
The Court of Cassation got involved for the first time, in 2019, by formulating an opinion which concluded that the reform was compatible with the ILO Convention. But it was only a legal light, devoid of enforceable force, and the sling continued. Several appeal courses have, in fact, estimated that they were entitled to verify whether the grid brought sufficient financial compensation, with regard to the damage suffered by the employee and his particular situation (age, state of health, prospects for Back to employment, etc.). In doing so, the “rebels” courts carried out concrete (or in concreto) control in order to ensure that the application of the law leads to an “adequate” compensation.
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