Shile we have heard a lot about moral harassment of employees in recent years, the general public is less informed about the practice carried out by legal professionals.
The evocation by employees of the existence of moral harassment by their former employer has now become commonplace in the context of a dispute before an industrial tribunal (CPH). Lawyers defending employers have noted an increase in this type of request, sometimes suggesting that all employees are harassed.
This practice is beginning to raise a serious difficulty, endangering the very concept of moral harassment.
The labor code is however very clear on the matter: “No employee must suffer repeated acts of moral harassment whose object or effect is a deterioration of their working conditions likely to infringe their rights and dignity, alter their physical or mental health or compromise their professional future. »
Additional amounts of money
This definition therefore implies quite exceptional situations, in which the employees concerned experience a real deterioration in their daily life at work. This is not a simple disagreement with certain colleagues, a common occurrence in business. Logically, moral harassment should therefore only rarely be invoked before an industrial tribunal, in particular following dismissal. It is the opposite that we observe.
The “Macron scale”, now well known, is not unrelated to the sharp increase in the mention of harassment during a dispute with an employer. Despite numerous attempts, this scale has ultimately never been called into question by judges since its creation. On the other hand, it poses a serious problem for employees by limiting the maximum compensation they can obtain when contesting their dismissal.
To get around this difficulty, the existence of moral harassment by the employer is increasingly cited in an attempt to obtain additional sums of money, which are not taken into account when calculating the scale. Moral harassment can in fact lead an employer to have to pay damages to a former employee, or even to cancel his dismissal, which makes the Macron scale inapplicable.
But the logic at work is not always only financial.
The notion of moral harassment has in fact become somewhat overused over time and is not always well understood by employees who regularly, wrongly, consider themselves victims of harassment in the presence of an authoritarian manager.
You have 37.14% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.