Dismissal permit contingent upon re-entry into employment

One of the ways in which an employer may terminate the service contract with one of its employees is with the permission of the National Employee Insurance Agency, UWV. The latter by virtue of the Dismissals Decree of the Netherlands is authorised – where the employer’s decision to dismiss the employee has been made for commercial reasons – to add a “re-entry into employment” rider to its decision to grant permission for the employee’s dismissal.

The upshot of this is that the employer for a 26-week term of the date as at which the UWV issued its dismissal decision will continue to be banned from hiring anyone else in lieu of his original employee without first offering the latter his old job back, and will likewise be banned for the same term from recruiting temporary staff to replace the dismissed employee.

Any former employee having been dismissed in a scenario such as the one outlined above has the right to invoke the “re-entry into employment” rider whenever he finds that his former employer within the first 26 weeks has resorted to recruiting one or more temporary workers to take up his old duties. The employer in question will then have no choice but to reinstate his former employee’s service contract rather than applying the shortcut of having his former employee work for him through a temporary employment agency.