The obligation for an employer to communicate information to the authorities at an early stage of a collective redundancy project, as laid down in the relevant directive (98/59/EC), is not intended to confer individual protection on workers, but is intended solely to inform the competent authority so that it can form a general idea of the reasons for and implications of the project in order to anticipate its consequences as far as possible.
This is the substance of the judgment handed down on Thursday 13 July (Case C134/22) by the Court of Justice of the EU in response to the German Federal Labour Court, which had brought a case for review after a dismissed employee had challenged his dismissal before the competent national court. The interested party argued that no copy of the notice of proposed collective redundancies sent to the works council on 17 January 2020 had been sent on the same date to the relevant public employment agency. Although this transmission is required by the above-mentioned directive and the German law transposing it into national law, the failure to do so would, according to the person concerned, constitute grounds for invalidating his dismissal.
Although confirming that this omission constituted a breach of the German law transposing the Directive, the German Federal Labour Court doubted that it could constitute grounds for invalidating the dismissal, since neither the Directive nor national law provided for a penalty for such a breach. The German court therefore asked the General Court whether the obligation in question was intended to confer individual protection on workers.
The European judges answer in the negative: the obligation of an employer who is contemplating collective redundancies to forward to the competent public authority a copy of, at least, certain elements of the written communication which the employer sent to the workers’ representatives for consultation purposes is not intended to confer individual protection on the workers concerned. This information is sent to this authority - which plays no active role during the consultation procedure involving workers’ representatives - purely for information purposes, so that it can form a general idea of the redundancy project and anticipate the consequences as far as possible before it is officially notified of the actual collective redundancy.
The Court thus concludes, in view of the purpose of this transmission of information and the fact that it takes place at a stage when collective redundancies are only contemplated by the employer, the action of the competent public authority is intended not to deal with each worker’s individual situation, but to gain an overall understanding of the projected collective redundancies. Link to the judgment: https://aeur.eu/f/820 (Original version in French by Francesco Gariazzo)