Societas et Iurisprudentia (Sep 2017)
Job-offering Obligation of Employer and Legal Certainty
Abstract
Principle of legal certainty is examined also with regard to its application in relation to the requirement of predictability of judicial decisions. It can be said that relatively complicated labour-law institute is the so-called employer’s obligation to offer employment at the end of the employment relationship (according to the Section 63(2) of the Slovak Labour Code). In the Slovak Republic, the Labour Code establishes the employer’s obligation to offer another suitable work (it is even a substantive condition for the validity of a notice) for certain reasons of termination of employment by the employer’s dismissal, but does not specify specific procedures and conditions for such an offer (for example how to make this offer and what to do when there are less vacant positions than dismissed employees, etc.). Judicial decisions often state invalidity of termination of an employment relationship due to the failure to offer a suitable job position, but courts normally do not address specifically how the employer should proceed. If the obligation to offer employment is formulated in law just generally, courts are precisely the institutions which should create by their decision-making activities (which should be consistent) legislation for the application practice and establish state of legal certainty. In the presented paper, we pay our attention to the issue of the employer’s obligation to offer employment from the point of view of court decisions, and we also deal more specifically with the question of when to offer a suitable job position.
