King Willem - statue

Redeployment after a termination

In the Netherlands, employers must make an effort to reassign employees before they terminate them. But if you work for a large, multinational corporation, is your employer obligated to find a position for you anywhere in the world?

 Dismissal

An employer must have reasonable grounds to dismiss an employee. Those grounds can including  reprehensible behaviour, poor performance or economic reasons. However, employers also have an obligation to redeploy staff prior to dismissing them. This means that the employer must make efforts to redeploy the employee within the company before proceeding to dismissal.

Legal obligation

The question then arises as to whether this obligation to redeploy is limited to the particular company where the employee is working or whether it applies to the entire corporate group to which the company belongs. Dutch case law is currently divided on this question.

Recently, a district court judge ruled on the obligation of redeployment. That ruling said that redeployment within an entire corporation is only obligatory when the group is defined as an economic entity with a central management presiding over the various subdivisions.

Other opinions

However, other district courts have reached different judgments. They have ruled that efforts must be made to redeploy within the group as a whole. An employer who declines to do this may be heavily penalised. A district judge in Rotterdam decided that €90,000 was just compensation for an employee when it was found that the employer had not even considered redeployment within the corporate family.

What to do?

Our advice to employers is therefore to consider redeployment very seriously and to show that they have looked at options across the corporate group. Otherwise the risk is too high that a district judge will penalise the dismissal by imposing a high level of just compensation.

If you are an employee who is facing a dismissal or if you are an employer who must dismiss an employee, you can contact our specialised lawyers to assist you.