Governance and Tripartism working paper series

Report on collective dismissals: A comparative and contextual analysis of the law on collective redundancies

This report provides an overview of collective dismissal regulation in 13 EU Member States, and examines both national and supranational rules shaping collective redundancy processes in those countries.

This report was produced by a group of independent experts, all of them labour lawyers, and most of them academic labour lawyers, with a view to assisting the ILO in the context of the ongoing technical assistance programme developed with the Greek Government in a number of areas, including “labour legislation to regulate collective dismissals”.

As is widely known, since May 2010 the Union’s Euro-area Member States and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been providing financial support to Greece through an Economic Adjustment Programme in the context of a sharp deterioration in the country’s financing conditions. This support has been accompanied by a request on the part of the lending institutions’ representatives to implement a number of reforms aimed at improving the competitiveness of the Greek economy. Amongst a series of detailed specifications, Greece has been asked to adopt “reforms [that] will ease interpretation of and foster compliance with labour laws with a view to bring legislation in line with EU best practices, and to this end a review will be carried out […], comparing Greek regulations on […] collective dismissal rules and procedures, with those in other EU Member States”.

Co-funded by Greece and the European Union