Cass. Soc., 4 December 2024, no. 23-15.337
In a ruling handed down on 4 December 2024, the French Supreme Court (Cour de cassation) clarified the conditions under which a penalty payment (astreinte) within the meaning of Article L.3121-9 of the Labour Code can be defined.
This is the solution adopted by the Cour de cassation in a ruling dated 4 December 2024.
In this case, an employee was declared unfit on 11 June 2019, as the medical opinion did not make it possible to understand whether the employee’s state of health allowed him to be reclassified.
The employer resumed payment of the salary in September 2019 and offered a reclassification abroad on 10 October 2019, which the employee refused. It asked the occupational physician for clarification on 14 October 2019 and consulted the other companies in the group for a possible reclassification on 29 November 2019.
On 31 January 2020, the employee applied to the industrial tribunal for his employment contract to be terminated, before being dismissed on 26 March 2020 on the grounds of unfitness and inability to redeploy.
The employee argued that the judicial termination of the contract was justified in particular by the inertia of his employer, who had left him in a situation of inactivity without offering him a redeployment position or dismissing him.
The Court of Appeal found that the employer had been slow to find a new job and then to proceed with the dismissal. However, it dismissed the employee, ruling that, since no time limit had been set for the redeployment obligation, the employer’s slowness could not constitute a breach of its obligations.
On appeal by the employee, the Court of Cassation overturned the decision of the Court of Appeal, ruling that “it was clear from its findings that the employee had been kept in a situation of forced inactivity within the company, This should have led the court to deduce that the employer had failed to fulfil its obligations, and that it was up to the court to determine whether such a failure was serious enough to prevent the employment contract from continuing […] “.
The ruling is based on articles L. 1226-11 and L. 1222-1 of the French Employment Code, the latter laying down the principle that an employment contract must be performed in good faith.
This principle therefore requires the employer to react promptly when an employee is declared unfit for work, so as not to leave the employee in a situation of forced inactivity, regardless of whether the law sets any time limit.
It will be up to the referring Court of Appeal to determine whether the employer’s misconduct was sufficiently serious to justify judicial termination of the employment contract.