I have been a reader of this sub since the first hour.
Again and again it amazes me what kind of work situations exist – especially in the USA.
I myself was born in Germany and live here, and in Germany too is a tendency for employers to become bolder and not give a shit about workers' rights.
I want to tell you a story that happened to my father and show you how important it is to stand up to employers and stand up for your own rights.
(Sorry the text is getting a bit long, for those who don't want to read the whole text, there is a tl:dr below).
My father is a native of another country.
He moved to Germany after his marriage in 1989 – my mother grew up in Germany herself-.
After a settling-in period and some seasonal jobs, my father started working in a company where my grandfather had already worked.
Times were different then, so he got a great employment contract, by today's standards.
Not only was the income generous, but a lot of security and bonuses were part of the contract.
My father has been working for this company for almost 30 years now.
So my father has been through all the crises that a company can go through.
Economic crisis, short-time work, the sale of the company to a new employer, Corona etc. etc.
Now the “new” employer had the idea to change the old contracts of the employees.
The income should be cut drastically, the protections and bonuses should be cancelled and the contract should be detached from the collective agreement, which means that the income is no longer co-determined by the union.
So if the union manages to win an increase, then this increase is no longer automatically applies to the one who has a collective agreement.
At the same time, the contract should also only be for a limited period, namely for one year, which means that you could have gotten a new contract every year.
So my father got a letter in his hand two years ago saying that a contract change should be made.
The rotten thing is that by signing it, he would have agreed that his old contract would be terminated and the new contract would be automatically accepted.
In doing so, the new contract would thus have been considered a completely new contract, so that the legal disadvantages would also have come with a new contract.
For example, the protection against dismissal: In Germany, the longer you have a contract, the more difficult it is to dismiss someone.
My father got the letter and called me directly, (you must know I'm a lawyer) and said that they had put a letter in his hand and told him to sign it by tomorrow but best right now.
Since the letter was written in “legal” German, he wanted me to give him an assessment of what it really said and what the consequences would have been for him.
I immediately told him not to sign anything, to send me a copy of the letter and I would get back to him.
Within the next half hour I had this letter in front of me and I fell off my chair.
Here comes an employer with the idea of making up his own rules and wanting to change a contract without a reason.
So I called my father and told him to go to his supervisor and say that he needs some more time to think about it and then he will let him know within a week what he is going to do with the letter.
At the same time I told my father that he should call his lawyer and make an urgent appointment with him, so that he can also get advice from him, because although I am a lawyer, I am not a lawyer for labor law.
So my father did exactly that, whereupon his superior would have said that such a thing would not go, one week would be too long, he would give him two days time, so that he should say until the end of the week what is now phase.
My father's lawyer did give him an appointment.
I, on the other hand, did my own research during that time
In Germany a contract may not be changed without other.
There are only a few situations where an existing contract may be changed, among other things, this may only happen if the company is on the verge of insolvency.
But then you are only allowed to change the contracts if you can prove that you have an insolvency plan and you still could not avert insolvency.
Thus, a change of existing contracts is only possible as ultima ratio.
My father's company was not doing well at the time, but they were definitely not facing insolvency.
At the end of the deadline set by the employer, one of the bosses of the company came to my father and asked what was going on and why my father did not want to sign the contract.
My father then only asked why a change in the contract was necessary.
The boss only answers that this is the way it is and that my father must accept this and sign the new contract.
Exactly in this moment my father took his cell phone in the hand and called me and asked me whether he is forced to sign the letter.
I asked my father why he was calling me now and why he was asking me this question.
To which my father replied “One of the bosses is standing in front of me right now and said I was forced to sign.”
I asked my father to turn on the speakers of his cell phone so that the boss could also hear my answer.
In short, my father is not forced to do anything. His contract is still valid and the change would have to be accepted by my father first, as long as he does not do so, nothing would change.
My father thanked me and the boss left the room without saying a word.
At the same time, my father's lawyer wrote a letter to my father's company stating that he would now represent my father and that everything would go through his lawyer.
The next few months turned into a shitshow.
First the company replied to the lawyer and asked him to send a document proving that the lawyer really represented my father.
My father was given tasks that either asked too much of him or were so boring and mindless that he would have gone crazy within the 8 hours.
At the same time, my father was called into the office every week and was asked over and over again why he didn't want to sign and that he should do it now.
My father always answered in the same way “I am a stupid foreigner, I don't understand anything. Just contact my lawyer and discuss everything with him.”
In the same time my father got sick with Coronat (caught on the work, because the company gave a shit on it, who becomes now ill and who not) and also in this time, my father was called each day and asked whether he comes now to work, although he had a certificate of the doctor, which announced him for four weeks unfit for work.
The climax was then that my father was told that if he did not sign the new contract, he would be terminated.
At some point, it went too far for me personally, and I asked my father to ask at his next meeting with the lawyer if it would be okay if he could call me so I could ask him a few questions.
So the lawyer called me and I asked him my question.
“1. Is it okay to just change an existing contract? – Because I don't think so, unless bankruptcy is imminent.
2. does my father have to sign the change? – Because I don't think so.
3. is it so that my father will be terminated if he does not accept the change of contract? – Because even there, I don't believe it because it's not grounds for termination to accept a contract change.”
My father's lawyer answered like this, “You know Mr. Garmanarnar_03, everything you believe is true. Your father doesn't have to accept anything and can't be terminated. But employers pull out their dirtiest tricks to get even close to what they want.”
So we agreed that my father would not accept the contract change and waited for a reason why the contracts should be changed.
However, no such reason was ever provided.
At some point, the employer came up with the idea of dismissing my father by mutual agreement and paying him a severance package.
My father's lawyer and I calculated how many years my father actually still had to work until his retirement and calculated how much money he would earn in those years.
As luck would have it, inflation within the euro-zone also started during that time.
So we added a fictitious number to compensate for the inflation.
So my father's lawyer wrote a letter to the company offering to accept the amicable termination, but only if the severance pay covered an amount that was deemed reasonable by our calculation.
Again, no response came for the next few months.
So personally, I was bracing myself for the fact that we were going into the third year of this shitshow.
A week ago, my father called me.
The supervisor of him had come to him and said, that the employer had decided to withdraw the contract change, everything will remain as before.
They have realized that my father was right and that it would not be possible to change his contract.
And that they apologize for the inconvenience.
So my father stubbornly refused to accept something that would have been illegal.
He informed himself about his rights, initiated everything to ensure that he would not be disadvantaged, and emerged as the winner from this battle.
The sad thing is that out of about 300 employees, he is the only one who did not accept this contract change.
So the employer managed to intimidate the other workers, scare them and enforce what he wanted to enforce.
My father did everything he could to get his colleagues not to sign the contract change either, but when they were threatened with termination, they abandoned and signed.
tl.dr: My father's employer wanted to change his employment contract in an illegal way.
My father did not let this happen to him and called in his lawyer.
After a long struggle of two years, the employer realized that my father would stand firm and neither terminated him nor changed his contract.
My father is the only one of about 300 employees who now still works with an old and much better contract than the rest of his colleagues, because they accepted the worse contracts for fear of being fired.
I hope that this story shows you that you have to fight for your rights, that employers are getting bolder and bolder, and that despite intimidation and nasty tricks, you can't let them get to you.
They are more dependent on us than we are on them!
Just because the work-market is changing doesn't mean we can't do anything about it!