There is so much mis-information out there about the “Contract of Employment”, that I feel frustratingly compelled to write this article to start a discussion on a greatly confused topic.
The only legal “Contract of Employment” stipulation from the Irish Department of Enterprise Trade & Innovation (DETI) is that under the Terms of the Employment Information Act (1994 et al..), an Employer is required to notify the Employee of the Terms & Conditions of the Employment within a period of 2 months from the commencement date of the employment. This EIA form (as we call it at Progressive) is issued to all employees and states the basic information associated with the employment, such as start date, finish date (if available), user enterprise job location, salary, payment frequency, holiday entitlements, time-sheet information, code of conduct etc.,
In our Recruitment and Employment Agency business, Temporary/ Contract employees on our books are deemed by Revenue to be Employees of the Agency, rather than Employees of the User Enterprise. This is an obvious part of the attraction for User Enterprises in the use of agency workers insofar as they do not incur any employment legislation liabilities, with the one exception of unfair dismissal, where the User Enterprise can be held liable if the Employment Appeals Tribunal were to deem that an “employee” was unfairly dismissed.
With regard to employee rights, the employee is very well protected under Irish legislation, which is only right and proper. Redundancy entitlements (particularly relevant in the current economic circumstances) are applicable to an employment after a period of two years. The two-year rule would appear to be a very brief period after which a Redundancy Entitlement arises – the way the Government overcomes its own employment legislation is by keeping certain staff on rolling year-on-year contracts, which would appear at a very minimum to not be in the spirit of the law, but it does solve that thorny Redundancy issue !
The amount of Employment Legislation generally in Ireland is in my opinion excessive and would appear to be constructed around the assumption that the Employee in every instance has to be protected from the exploitative Employer – what about the Kudos for the Employer who generated the job in the first place ?.
The Rules of engagement should be very simple – The employee accepts a job with the Employer, under a simply defined set of terms such as job title, hours of work, rates of pay, holiday entitlements, payroll frequency, code of conduct etc., as dictated by the terms of the Employment Information Act (1994 et al..). The relationship should be allowed to continue (without the interference of the State) uninterrupted, until as they say in the Divorce Courts “Unhappy differences have arisen between the parties”, at which point each party should be free to go their own way, unfettered !