Termination with notice

An employer may terminate the employment contract of a regular employee, either

• on substantial grounds arising from the individual employee, or
• for reasons of redundancy.

Substantial grounds may include, for example, failure to comply with the employer’s instructions, neglect of duties, unjustified absence, inappropriate behavior, or negligence at work.

You cannot normally be dismissed for neglecting your duties or failing to follow workplace instructions before you have been warned and given an opportunity to rectify your conduct, but the employer may be entitled to terminate your employment contract without issuing a warning, or even to dissolve the contract with immediate effect in cases of serious fault or negligence.

An employee must be given a hearing before terminating employment, and is always entitled to invite an assistant or counsel to any hearing concerning termination of a job.

An employee cannot be lawfully dismissed on account of a brief period of illness, political or religious convictions, or participation in forms of industrial action that are acceptable under the Collective Agreements Act.

The most common reason for dismissal is some deterioration in business profitability or reorganisation of production and work resulting in circumstances in which the employer can no longer provide the previous or other work to the employee, or retrain the employee for new duties. The reduction in work must be substantial and permanent in such cases. 

If the employer nevertheless has other work available, either in the enterprise concerned or in some other enterprise in which the employer exercises a controlling interest in matters of staffing, then this work must be offered to employees who are otherwise threatened with redundancy.

An employee is always entitled to know the grounds for dismissal, and the employer must be able to prove the right to terminate the employment contract in a court of law.

The court may then order the employer to pay compensation to the employee for unlawful dismissal. This compensation varies between 3 and 24 months’ wages. The court cannot order reinstatement, even when it finds that a dismissal was unlawful.

A temporary employment contract cannot be terminated prematurely unless this was specially agreed in the contract or later during the employment. You may nevertheless terminate your temporary employment contract before the agreed time if you can persuade the employer to accept this. A party who prematurely terminates temporary employment with no such mutual agreement may be liable to compensate the other party for any loss or damage caused by the unfounded termination.

Although no period of notice of termination may apply in temporary employment unless this was agreed in the employment contract or subsequently, the employment may nevertheless be terminated with immediate effect on the same grounds as a regular open-ended contract of employment. A temporary employee may not be treated inequitably in relation to permanent employees merely because of the length of employment.