An amazing victory and good news for our French colleagues - French workers on sick leave now have the right to paid leaves! Congratulations @SolInfoNat and @SolidairesRedHat !
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The Working Time Directive 2003/88/EC, a key part of European labor law, requires all Member States to take the necessary measures to ensure that every worker benefits from a paid annual leave of at least four weeks in accordance with the conditions defined in the national legislation.
The "in accordance with the conditions defined in the national legislation" part has been the caveat for French workers for many years. Under the French labor law, certain periods of employee absence were not considered actual working time. In particular, this was used for absences due to non-work-related illnesses - workers on long-term sickness leaves could not claim their paid leaves for the period of sickness.
So what changed?
After a long legal battle among legislators and years of advocacy and public work by labor organizations, on September 13 this year, the French supreme court (Cour de cassation) ruled that employees suffering from an illness of any nature whatsoever (work-related or not) had the right to include the sickness period in their calculation for claiming paid leaves.
Moreover, the court ruled that employees could request compensation for unused paid leaves for the entire period they worked for a company. Normally, the calculation of retroactive compensations is limited to three years in France, but this limit shall not apply if an employee was never given the option to get a paid leave in the first place by their employer.
