Case Law Alert: Incapacity
Dispensation from redeployment only applies if the medical opinion rules out the possibility of remaining in employment. In the case at hand, an employee was held unfit for work following a non-occupational illness. The doctor’s opinion stated that “any continued employment of the employee in this company would be seriously detrimental to his health”. The employer took the view that it could benefit from the legally prescribed exemption from redeployment, which, in its view, was specifically aimed at preventing the employee from remaining in a job within the employing company. The employee was dismissed the following month, without any search for redeployment having been undertaken.
The dismissal was deemed to be without a real or serious cause by the lower courts, which were approved by the Cour de cassation. While it has been established that the employer has no duty to look for redeployment when the medical opinion expressly states that the employee remaining in any employment would be seriously detrimental to the employee’s health, this is not the case when the opinion confines the impossibility of keeping the employee in a job to the company.
This analysis is consistent with existing case law, according to which the obligation to redeploy applies even if the employee is unsuitable “for any job in the company”. The scope of the redeployment obligation extends beyond the employing company, and this does not rule out the possibility of redeployment to another job available within another entity of the group. (Cass. soc., 13 September 2023, no. 22-12.970)