Subject to any excessive infringement of the employee’s right to respect for their personal and family life or their right to rest, deciding on a new distribution of working time across the day falls within the employer’s management powers.
In this case, a medico-psychological care assistant employed by a non-profit association had become a family carer for her disabled son. When the association moved to annualise working time, she asked to keep her existing daytime hours in order to be at home for her son in the morning and the evening. The association replied that it could not adapt her hours without disproportionate cost, and offered her part-time work instead. She applied to the labour court in summary proceedings (référé) for an order, on pain of a penalty, that her hours be maintained, arguing that the change amounted to a manifestly unlawful disturbance (trouble manifestement illicite) of her working arrangements.
The Court of Appeal refused the order, and the Court of Cassation dismissed her appeal. First, the employer had proposed part-time work without imposing it. Second, the lower court had found, in its sovereign assessment of the evidence, that the hours she sought would impose disproportionate burdens on the employer, since the resulting cost would worsen the association’s already heavily strained finances ; it could therefore rule out any manifestly unlawful disturbance.
The decision confirms that an employee’s personal circumstances, however compelling, do not entitle them to impose accommodations that place a disproportionate burden on the employer, at least where, as here, the employer has not imposed a change but offered an alternative.
