عقد العمل وانتهاء العقد في ألمانيا

The Betriebsrat (works council) holds genuine co-decision rights, notably over working time, monitoring arrangements and certain individual measures. German codetermination is not a consultative body.

Tarifverträge, next, are negotiated by sector and by region, and whether they apply depends on the employer's membership of an employers' federation or on an administrative extension. Establishing whether it is bound falls to the employer arriving from abroad, and the answer is never self-evident.

German law goes further than the European regulation on data protection: appointing a data protection officer becomes mandatory once a small number of people regularly process personal data by automated means, a threshold to be measured against the firm's actual headcount rather than assumed to be met. A works agreement covering the processing of staff data is also common practice and is usually expected by the works council.