Working conditions (Works Constitution Act)
Working conditions are legal and factual circumstances under which employees perform their work . The working conditions are legally shaped primarily through laws , collective bargaining agreements , works agreements , works regulations or employment contracts .
General
Among the working conditions in employment contracts and other legal sources are regulated, include not only the nature and extent of the work performance to which the employee is required and the amount and composition of remuneration and a possible trial period , place of work , working time , overtime , work safety , holidays , social , occupational health , work environment , environmental conditions ( noise , weather - and climate harassment ), gender issues and protection against dismissal .
For reasons of rationalization and standardization , the employer often compiles general working conditions in a single employment contract, which forms the basis for the individual employment contracts. They become part of the individual employment contract without being negotiated with the individual employee. Working conditions pre-formulated by the employer are therefore subject to judicial content control according to the law of the general terms and conditions (§§ 305 ff BGB) and can be checked by courts for their legal validity.
history
During slavery , workers suffered from inhumane working conditions. They were often owned by their employer, who could dispose of them at will. The exploitation of their labor force was often coerced into corporal punishment . The Christianity forbade Christians to acquire other Christians or sell, making slavery while in the High Middle Ages in Central Europe disappeared, but all the more important south of the Alps, such as in the Italian maritime republics , in the Black Sea region , on the Balkans and in the Middle East , won particularly in Egypt .
In the Middle Ages , family and craft work took place under a personal protection and care relationship. The labor of the farmer for the landlord or lord included handicrafts and tension services ( crowd work ). The serfs were almost everywhere - especially in the 10th and 11th centuries - at the mercy of their liege lords ( French corvéables à merci ). Guilds and cities increasingly regulated the working conditions of workers. Above all, the weavers ( Cologne weavers uprising between 1369 and 1371) succeeded in implementing improvements in working conditions. The wool weavers of Speyer, for example, reached the first collective agreements similar to collective agreements on October 31, 1351. Around 1400, a guild role of Lübeck gunsmiths, ring ropers and brace makers regulated their working conditions down to the last detail. The cities of Westphalia and the Westphalian knighthood agreed in 1423 a servants and daily wage order in order to curb the emigration to the cities through general wage taxes.
From the discovery of America in 1492 to 1870, more than 11 million African slaves were sold to America. Most of these (4.1 million) ended up in the British, French, Dutch and Danish colonies in the Caribbean via the transatlantic triangular trade . Almost as many Africans (4 million) were brought to Brazil by Portuguese traders , 2.5 million were sold to the Spanish colonies in South America . The smallest group are the approximately 500,000 African slaves who ended up in the thirteen British colonies on the North American mainland and in the United States , which was founded in July 1776 . The poor working conditions on the cotton , coffee or sugar cane plantations in North America led to low life expectancy and falling birth rates among female slaves.
In France in the 17th century the farmers were burdened with the obligation to work unpaid on the public roads ( French corvée royale ); from June 1738 this obligation existed in general for all employees.
During the industrialization of the Wilhelminian era , there was a transition from handicrafts in small businesses to industrial mass production in factories , which was accompanied by a change from the family welfare relationship to the “ worker production factor”, whose costs were to be reduced as much as possible. Alfred Hueck and Hans Carl Nipperdey expressed that "excessively long working hours , starvation wages , the truck system , inadequate health and accident protection , above all excessive expansion of women and child labor " were the distinguishing features of the social conditions at that time. The first worker-friendly working conditions were created by the Prussian regulation of September 1839, which banned factory work for children under 9 years of age and a working time limit of 10 hours for children under 16 years of age.
The first trade unions that emerged at national level in the course of the revolution of 1848/1849 campaigned for workers' rights from the start. They did not see themselves solely as protective organizations, but often acted as aggressively operating market associations and tried to change working conditions in the interests of their members. The first German trade union was established in 1849 with the German Printing Association. The amendment to the trade regulations of June 1891 led to a ban on night work for young people and workers and a maximum working time of 10 hours per day for women. The first collective bargaining agreement from May 1873 strengthened the workers' rights of this branch of industry among the book printers. The Works Council Act of February 1920 brought the first co-determination rights for employees; the 8-hour day for all industrial workers (since November 1918) and all white-collar workers (since March 1919) led to uniform reductions in working hours.
Legal issues
In § 106 GewO , essential working conditions are enumerated within the scope of the employer's right to issue instructions , namely work content , place of work and working hours for the work of the employee, which the employer can determine in more detail at its reasonable discretion , unless these working conditions are based on an employment contract, provisions of a works agreement, a applicable collective agreement or statutory provisions. When exercising the right to issue instructions, the employer regularly has a wide scope for unilateral structuring of working conditions. It enables the employer to determine in detail the performance obligation, which is only described in the employment contract, in terms of time, type and location. The employer's right of direction may be restricted by law, collective bargaining agreement, works agreement or individual employment contract. The scope of the mutual main performance obligations is not subject to the employer's general right to issue instructions. The regulation of the mutual main performance obligations belongs to the core area of the employment relationship with the consequence that these working conditions can only be designed by law, collective or individual employment contract. According to German works constitution law ( Section 77 (3 ) BetrVG ), wages and other working conditions that are or are usually regulated by collective agreements cannot be the subject of a works agreement .
A change in the working conditions through unilateral performance determination by the employer is only possible as far as the right of direction is factually sufficient. In any case, this includes a specification of the working conditions. An employment contract stipulates that an employee owes his labor to an employer according to his instructions in return for remuneration . This means that the employer's right to specify the working conditions, which are only generally described in the employment contract, is inherent in every employment contract. If the employer's right to issue instructions is insufficient to bring about a change in the working conditions, the employer is dependent on the means of changing notice.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Kathrin Kreutzer, Arbeitsrecht , 1997, p. 57
- ↑ Christa Chorherr, W he throws the first stone ?: Oppression of women by religion. Judaism-Christianity-Islam , 2010, p. 204
- ↑ Dirk Neumann / Josef Biebl, Working Hours Act , 2001, Rn. 1
- ↑ Rainer Schröder, On the Labor Constitution of the Late Middle Ages , 1984, p. 189
- ↑ Johannes Frerich / Martin Frey, From the pre-industrial period to the end of the Third Reich , 1996, p. 11
- ^ Paul Herre, German Middle Ages in Pictures and Words , 1912, p. 181
- ^ Andrew K. Frank, The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American South , 1999, p. 22
- ^ Walter Kaskel / Hermann Dersch, Arbeitsrecht , 1932, p. 2
- ^ Alfred Hueck / Hans Carl Nipperdey, Textbook of Labor Law , 1963, p. 9
- ↑ Viola Lindemann, Flexible Design of Working Conditions after the Reform of the Law of Obligations , 2003, p. 8
- ^ Anton Burghardt / Hermann Hoebel, Kompendium der Sozialpolitik , 1979, p. 126
- ^ BAG, judgment of March 27, 1980, Az .: 2 AZR 506/78
- ^ BAG, judgment of December 12, 1984, Az .: 7 AZR 509/83
- ^ BAG, judgment of December 12, 1984, Az .: 7 AZR 509/83
- ↑ Vera Ricarda Moll, The change in working conditions by the employer , 2009, p. 37
