In Germany, the drafting of the employment contract commits the payroll for its whole duration: the language used, the form adopted and the mandatory particulars are fixed by local law, not by the practice of head office.
Termination is the moment when drafting errors are paid for. Final settlement, notice, severance and exit documents obey local rules that the payroll manager applies every month: it is that person, and not the legal department at head office, who spots a poorly drawn contract. Having the model contract reviewed by the firm that will run the payroll costs little and avoids most disputes.
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.
Le vrai point de contrôle allemand est le statut au regard du Steuerberatungsgesetz : demander sans détour si le cabinet est Steuerberater ou s'il agit sous l'exception du § 6 Nr. 4 StBerG, et faire préciser dans le contrat où s'arrête sa prestation. Piège d'appellation : un Lohnsteuerhilfeverein n'est PAS un prestataire de paie pour entreprises — il n'assiste que des salariés pour leur propre déclaration de revenus. Autre particularité : il n'existe pas d'organisme unique de recouvrement social, l'attestation de régularité sociale est délivrée par la Krankenkasse de rattachement des salariés, et il faut parfois y ajouter celle de la Berufsgenossenschaft.
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