Life After Brexit? - Dublin, Paris Or Frankfurt (Video)

Is your business thinking of moving out of London post Brexit? Are you considering France, Germany or Ireland? What are the challenges of hiring, firing and managing staff in cities such as Paris, Frankfurt and Dublin?

Specialist employment lawyers from all three cities provide you with a wealth of information to allow you to compare and contrast.

Employment law won't be your only consideration, but it should be one of them.

self

Transcript

Jonathan Chamberlain: Well good morning or good afternoon wherever you are, people are linking in from both sides of the Atlantic for this webinar, I am delighted to welcome you on the one hand and also really very sorry. My name is Jonathan Chamberlain, I am a partner the Labour Employment and Equalities Team of Gowling WLG, I am joined by colleagues Dublin, Paris and Frankfurt who I will introduce in a moment and we're going to be talking about life after Brexit. You have joined us because you or your organisation are regrettably thinking that you might have to move, leave probably London and it's a question of where you're going to land. Now we imagine that you have already asked Google some basic questions about what's it going to be like employing people in any of these cities, how easy is it going to be to hire people to manage them and the aim of this webinar is to put you in touch with people who know, so that you can go beyond and behind the Google answer, in a real sense, a real flavour of the comparative employment law environment in each of those great cities. So what I want to do now is introduce you to today's speakers and indeed I will ask them to introduce themselves. In Paris we have my friend and partner Valérie Blandeau.

Valérie Blandeau: Hi everyone as Jonathan said I'm Valérie Blandeau here in the employment team of Gowling WLG in Paris and I have an extensive experience of working with international companies who try to either build a business in France or leave France because they think it's now not possible or viable so happy to discuss around the various things in this webinar.

Jonathan: Thanks Valérie and over to Frankfurt, Annette.

Annette Knoth: Thank you Jonathan, hello everybody. Yes, my name is Annette Knoth I'm head in the employment team at Arnecke Siebold and I am actually also really local from Frankfurt the city of the European Central Bank, but we have also offices in Munich and Berlin and I try to do my very best to convince you that German employment law is not as bad its reputation. Thank you.

Jonathan: Thanks Annette and then over to Dublin for Melanie and Ian.

Ian O'Herlihy: Hi Jonathan, this is Ian O'Herlihy and Melanie Crowley, I'm partner and chairman of the employment law benefits team at Mason Hayes and Curran and Melanie beside me here is head of our team. We have the largest employment and benefits team in Ireland and we deal very frequently with UK HR managers who manage their operations in Ireland from the UK.

Jonathan: Thank you very much Ian and if I can eco and repeat that for all of our speakers today, you are all people with whom we have worked closely and I know from my own experience just how good you are at explaining on and advising on the various issues that our clients face in your cities. So what we are going to do is we are going to look at three topics over the course of the next 55 minutes or so. The topics that all of you in our experience are needing to know more about. We're going to look at how easy it is to employ people on the terms that you want to employ them. Particularly senior executives, what are the constraints, what are the opportunities. We're then going to turn to ending the relationship and how easy is it to let people go. Particularly in the context of do you have too many of them or are they not performing quite up to scratch. And then finally, and this is probably the one we'll spend the least time on, but it has come up as we've had conversations about this, we're going to look at outsourcing. As the UK listeners will know it as TUPE and of course there are equivalent local manifestations in each of our cities and it works itself out surprisingly differently. So that's we're going to be covering, we're not going to be talking specifically about immigration, although I hasten to add that all my colleagues can ask those questions, or they have colleagues, sorry who can answer those questions for you if that's what particularly relevant. We're assuming that you are going to be able to get the people into the country that you need to get and it's a questions of what you do once they're there. So let's kick off. How easy is it to employ people particularly senior executives on the terms that we want to employ them. Now I could slightly cheat here by going over to Dublin because of the similarities there that you'll hear about in a moment, but I'm not, I'm going to start off as Monty Python would say, with something completely different, and ask Valérie, how easy is it to employ people in Paris.

Valérie: Yes, it is totally, well it's not totally, but it is slightly different from a French perspective to employ people and specifically when it comes to the terms on which we want to employ those employees. So to make a long long story short because Labour Code is about 2,000 pages and very small font so I'm not able to summarise that in the couple of minutes I have. In short terms, the things that you have to keep in mind when you want to employ someone is (a) you don't have necessarily to have written employment contract, this is not mandatory so this is something that is very different from what I see with my UK colleagues. Also it is still highlight recommended because everything is not in the Labour Code, some of the provisions that you need to have to make sure that the relationship is going to be as comfortable as you want is included in collective bargaining agreements or in terms of regulation within the company or company level agreement signed with union. So it is recommended to have this employment contract written to include some specific clause as non-compete or trial period or specific requirement as regards security or confidentiality or working timeframe. As I said it has to be compliant with European regulations nothing specifically new in this respect for you, French labour though and collective bargaining agreement. There is about 500 collective bargaining agreements in France, I don't know all of them by heart, but a couple of them [unclear 07:34], but it is something, it's the first question that someone will ask you if you want to hire someone in France, what is your activity in France and what is your collective bargaining agreement because that will put the frame for everything specifically about working time. Remuneration is something that you will have to think about, we have a minimum wage in France which is €1,580 gross per month and above that there is some scale in various collective bargaining agreements with minimum wages for every category of employee, so this is something that the employment contract will actively comply with. Executive is something kind of special specifically in terms of working time because we have something very innovative and special in France about this possibility of counting working time for executive with days of work instead of hours and seconds, which is something that is only implemented in France since 2001 which is a great new thing still innovative and still work in progress to be honest, but this is something really interesting and really flexible for every company, but very interesting for international company who are not suppose and not very happy to be obliged to count hours and overtime on every day on every week, but this kind of frame has to be in collective bargaining agreement or union side company agreement to be implemented in employment contract. So this is in a nutshell why you have to know when you want to hire someone in France, just a quick comment on gross and net because this is a question you might have with your correspondent in France. We are social contribution to be paid on top of the salary, 40% for the employer and 20% for the employee which means that basically for a €1,500 gross monthly salary the net for the employee in this pocket, before tax, will be €1,200 and the cost for the company, social contribution included, will be €2,100, so that's the major difference that comes to discussion sometimes when you want to hire someone and this is basically the very short summary of hiring people in France.

Jonathan: Thanks Valérie. So if I could make that even shorter and looking at this from the UK perspective, what's really interesting for us there is how relatively unimportant in one sense contracted employment are they or of the course the key document in the UK, not nearly so important in France to actually have them but your senior people you probably will want to have them to cover what we would consider to be some quite important stuff. So note that the working time rules do apply to senior executives which of course in the UK almost everybody opts out, but that they are measured in a relatively flexible way and certainly in my experience and I don't know if it of course of yours, there isn't any problem with senior executives having to work short hours is there?

Valérie: Definitely not. You're right.

Jonathan: So if that's the situation in Paris, what does it look like in Frankfurt Annette?

Annette: Thanks Jonathan. Well to answer your question how easy it is to employ people I would say it's very easy but that might be because I'm a German employment lawyer. Well there are some similarities with France also we have many written laws, we don't have hone labour court but various laws and that's also the reason why compared to the UK our employment agreements are rather short. They sometimes only refer to the respective legal provision and we also don't do you know like the definitions...