Under French law, any dismissal based, even in part, on an employee’s pregnancy is void. A pregnant employee is, moreover, not required to disclose her pregnancy – save where she claims the protections the law reserves for expectant mothers – and an employer may only dismiss her during the protected period for gross misconduct unrelated to the pregnancy, or where it cannot maintain the contract for a reason unconnected with the pregnancy or the birth. The Court of Cassation has now confirmed that this protection applies even where the employee deliberately chose not to tell her employer that she was pregnant.
In this case, an R&D project manager in the chemicals sector had informed her employer of her pregnancy and was dismissed for gross misconduct. The dismissal letter reproached her, among other things, with having endangered her own health and that of her foetus by handling chemical products contraindicated during pregnancy – conduct said to expose the employer to civil and criminal liability – and with having caused stress to a colleague. The Court of Appeal rejected her claim that the dismissal was void, reasoning that, by knowingly failing to tell her employer she was pregnant – and so preventing it from taking the protective steps her exposure to dangerous products demanded – she had exposed herself to a health risk capable of engaging her employer’s liability and had not performed her contract in good faith. The ground, it added, was tied not to her pregnancy but solely to her deliberate concealment of it.
The Court of Cassation quashed that decision. Declaring one’s pregnancy is a freedom, not an obligation, and the employee’s silence could not deprive her of the protection against dismissal. Since one of the grounds for the dismissal was tied to her pregnancy, that unlawful ground was enough, on its own, to render the dismissal void, regardless of the other grounds relied on.
