Federal Labor Court, decision dated January 20, 2015 – 9 AZR 860/13
Employees are increasingly making use of their right to demand the reduction of their working hours in accordance with the part-time and temporary employment law (TzBfG). What at first often looks like the beginning of a non-binding discussion about reducing working hours in the future, often quickly turns into a legally effective reduction of the original agreement of full-time employment in practice. The fault lies in the fiction contained in § 8 of the TzBfG, which states that the employee’s working hours are reduced to the extent desired by the employee if the employer has not rejected the employee’s request for reducing working hours in writing up to one month before the desired start date. Read on…