07.04.2016
The question of how to choose employees for dismissal on financial and production-related grounds has been reiterated by the Supreme Court (case KKO 2016:15) and the Labour Court (case TT 2016:17).
As a main rule, the employer may freely select the employees to be dismissed if the dismissal is based on financial and production-related grounds. However, the employer may not select employees on discriminatory or inappropriate grounds. Doing so will lead to the dismissal being considered groundless, as was the case in the Supreme Court Ruling.
A failure to follow a Collective Agreement’s regulation regarding the order in which employees should be dismissed, does not on the other hand alone mean that a dismissal is groundless. It may, however, result in compensatory fines to the employer, like in the Labour Court case mentioned above.
For more information on the cases, please contact the undersigned. A more detailed summary is also available in Finnish.
