The health crisis has often made people want to go green. However, you cannot move anywhere without informing your employer. An employee was dismissed because he now lives nearly 450 km from his place of work.
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If we go too far, we can be fired. This is what the judges of the Court of Appeal of Versailles have just affirmed. They had to decide on the case of a technical support manager for a company located in the Yvelines who had decided unilaterally, without informing his employer, to move to Brittany. Exactly 442 kilometers from his workplace. 4h30 by car or 3h30 by train. His employer decided to fire him. For him, the distance was too great and was a source of fatigue. No question of keeping an employee who settles so far from the head office.
The employee challenged his dismissal and brandished a strong argument: Article 8 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. This text states that everyone has the right to respect for their domicile and to free choice of their place of residence. He also explained that his move had not caused any delays and that he personally assumed the costs related to his home-work journeys. In addition, he specified that he only spent 17% of his time at headquarters, and that the rest of the time he was on business trips, including outside the geographical area defined in his employment contract.
And yet his dismissal was indeed confirmed in the name of a major principle: the obligation for the employer to preserve the health and safety of its employees. An obligation written black on white in the Labor Code. The judges considered that the employer was within his rights by refusing that his employee take such risks for his health.
Another interesting court decision for employees: judges now do not hesitate to search the Linkedin account of employees. We must therefore be careful with what we post, because justice is increasingly based on what we say on social networks. The Court of Cassation has just accepted as evidence the profile of the professional social network of an employee, which proved that she had quickly found work. And therefore who justified that his employer, who had dismissed him, only paid him a fairly modest severance pay. Nothing now escapes the eye of justice in matters of labor law.