President Iohannis asks Parliament to re-examine law suspending individual employment contracts under lockdown

President Klaus Iohannis is requesting Parliament to re-examine the law establishing provisions on the suspension of individual employment contracts during the state of emergency to extend social protection measures to the employees affected by the temporary interruption or reduction of the employers' business after the contracts are suspended.

He says in his request for re-examination issued on Friday to the vice-chair of the Senate Robert Cazanciuc that this law that supplements the Labour Code introduces a new situation in which the employer can suspend an individual employment contract as a result of "a state of siege or a state of emergency being declared." This piece of legislation also establishes social protection measures applicable to employees whose individual employment contract will be suspended as a result of this new legislative hypothesis.

"In our opinion, the regulated legislative solution (...) is likely to lead to implementation problems, but also to cause real confusion for the intended recipients," argues Iohannis.

The president also says that according to the explanatory memorandum, this legislative intervention aims to respond to a social problem, which the initiators indicate as a basis for the measures adopted in the context of the epidemiological situation caused by the spread of SARS-Co coronavirus 2 that "many employers have found that they do not have a legal text that allows them to reduce their business for this period, so that their employees may be protected."

He is of the opinion that the amendment of the Labour Code should be a measure with a longer time horizon than the current state of emergency, which implies the need for a preliminary assessment, a substantive analysis of social needs and the limits of state intervention in the employee-employer contractual relationship that would lead to the greatest possible legislative stability and efficiency.