Legally mandated severance compensation increases with seniority (Original Template)
| Quick info | |
|---|---|
| Data type | Numeric |
| Scale | Ordinal |
| Value labels |
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| Technical name | labor_redcomp_sen1 |
| Category | Labour and labour market |
| Label | Legally mandated severance compensation increases with seniority (OV) |
| Related indicators | |
This WoL indicator measures whether and in which steps the severance pay due upon termination increases with progressive length of service.
Labour law not only protects workes, but also creates segmentations, 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 with long-term employment with 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 found 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 used for prioritisation. However, the purpose of prioritisation is not to protect older employees, who are assumed to have a harder time finding a new job – after all, the prioritisation of length of service is almost always capped after about ten years. The situation of employees who have to change employers frequently 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 severance payment upon termination somewhat cushions the consequences for the employee and provides them with a financial bridge from which they can look for other paid work. The higher the severance payment to be made, the greater the protection.
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.
- Carlino, M., Fechner, H., & Schäfer, A. (2024). Using leximetrics for coding legal segmentation in employment law: The development and potential of the Worlds of Labour database. In I. Dingeldey, H. Fechner, & U. Mückenberger (Eds.), Constructing Worlds of Labour. Coverage and Generosity of Labour Law as Outcomes of Regulatory Social Policy. Palgrave Macmillan.
Misc
Project manager(s): Karolin Meyer, Jean-Yves Gerlitz, Andrea Schäfer, Heiner Fechner
Data release:- Version 0.001: Initial release
Revisions: No revisions yet
Sources
Own coding.
