Special protections against employment termination for workers with family responsibilities

Abstract

Loss of employment is one of the most stressful life events for everyone, especially for those with families. An employed mother - and increasingly a father - have family responsibilities towards their children, and these duties are often taken on, due to the decomposition of the family unit, by so-called single parents. Family responsibilities towards children are not, however, the only ones: one important segment of the responsibilities of the working-age population is the care for elderly and/or sick relatives and/or spouses. In this paper, it will be demonstrated that employees with family responsibilities are not a unique legal category. Family responsibilities must not, as such, constitute a valid reason for the termination of employment. The research below, therefore, seeks to present special protections against the termination of employment contracts of different categories of employees with obligations toward children, and to check whether and in what way such protections are provided to employees with obligations to other family members, since special protections against the termination of the employment contracts is explicitly guaranteed in Serbian law to the employees only during pregnancy and absence from work due to special/child care. In this regard, international standards relevant to the subject of the research are considered, as well as certain foreign systems that differently take into account the family situation of employees, using primarily the normative, comparative law method.

Keywords

• termination of an employment contract
• special protection
• unjustified reasons for dismissal
• workers with family responsibilities
• child care
• pregnancy
• care and support of family members