Legally mandated notice period increases with seniority (Original Template)

Quick info
Data type	Numeric
Scale	Ordinal
Value labels	1 = the law foresees increasing steps for more than 10 years 0.75 = the law foresees increasing steps from 5 up to 10 years 0.5 = the law foresees increasing steps from 2 and up to 5 years 0.25 = the law foresees increasing steps for up to 2 years 0 = the law does not foresee increasing steps / notice periods
Technical name	labor_notped_sen1
Category	Labour and labour market
Label	Legally mandated notice period increases with seniority (OV)
Related indicators	Legally mandated severance compensation increases with seniority (OV) Seniority is a decisive redundancy selection criterion (OV)

This WoL indicator measures if notice periods for employees increases with seniority by law.

Labour law not only protects workers, but also creates segmentation by privileging the standard employment relationship through higher standards of protection. The standard employment relationship is the classic model of the permanent, full-time employee who is permanently employed by one employer. Other forms of work – part-time, temporary agency work, work under a fixed-term contract, frequent changes of employee – receive less protection, even though the employment relationships in which they are engaged already inherently entail greater social risks. This leads to a further disadvantage for employees who are already in a precarious position.

Length of service is a common factor for prioritisation. However, the purpose of prioritisation is not to protect older workers, who are assumed to be less able to find a new job – after all, prioritisation of length of service is often capped after about ten years. The situation of employees who frequently have to change employers is socially more precarious than that of those with many years of service. The purpose of prioritisation is thus evidently not to provide special protection, but to cement the standard employment relationship.

Employees are existentially dependent on the income from their employment relationship, so termination of this by the employer also means the termination of the employee's ability to make a living. A mandatory notice period gives the employee the opportunity to make other arrangements to make a living in good time , for example to look for another job. The longer the notice period, the greater the protection in this sense.

Coding rules

The WoL is a leximetric dataset on individual employment protection. It quantifies the strength of the standard-setting, privileging, and equalising function of individual labour law (see Dingeldey et al. 2022). The scale ranges from "0" to "1" where "0" corresponds to the law do not recognise notice periods for employees increasing with seniority and "1" to the law do recognise notice periods for employees increasing with seniority in steps for more than 10 years. For country-specific information see WoL documentation (forthcoming).

Bibliographic info

Citation: Irene Dingeldey, Heiner Fechner, Jean-Yves Gerlitz, Jenny Hahs, Ulrich Mückenberger, Worlds of Labour: Introducing the Standard-Setting, Privileging and Equalising Typology as a Measure of Legal Segmentation in Labour Law, Industrial Law Journal, Volume 51, Issue 3, September 2022, Pages 560–597, https://doi.org/10.1093/indlaw/dwab016

Related publications:

• Mückenberger, Ulrich, 1985. "Die Krise des Normalarbeitsverhältnisses - Hat das Arbeitsrecht noch Zukunft?" Zeitschrift für Sozialreform 31: 415-434; 457-475
• Mückenberger, Ulrich, and Simon Deakin. 1989. "From Deregulation to a European Floor of Rights: Labour Law, Flexibilisation and the European Single Market." Zeitschrift Für Ausländisches Und Internationales Arbeits- Und Sozialrecht 3: 153–207.

Misc

Project manager(s): Heiner Fechner

Data release:

• Version 0.001: Initial release

Revisions: No revisions yet

Sources

Own coding.