Dismissal after employee’s culpable conduct

An employee’s culpable conduct can give the employer an adequate reason for dismissal including where the employee has displayed the conduct in question outside the workplace and/or outside business hours, as aptly illustrated by a recent Sub District Court judgment to the relevant effect.

The Sub District Court in question upon the request of a secondary school dissolved the employment agreement with one of the school’s caretakers, whose culpable conduct according to the school had made it unreasonable to expect his employer to allow the employment contract to carry on. Having stumbled upon 47 cannabis plants during a raid of the caretaker’s home, the police had detained the man. The Sub District Court ruled that the turmoil this had caused among the school’s pupils and their parents warranted the dissolution of the caretaker’s employment contract. 

The Sub District Court – making allowances for the applicable term of notice – ordered the dissolution of the employment contract with effect from the first of May 2016. As the caretaker by virtue of his Collective Labour Agreement was entitled to supplementary benefits over and above his unemployment benefits, the Court dismissed the main’s request to be granted a transition allowance: the transitional regime as per the Work and Security Act of the Netherlands stipulates that no transition allowance is due and payable on condition that the employer and employee prior to the first of July 2015 should have come to arrangements concerning entitlement to employee provisions owing to the termination of the employee’s service contract, which the Court confirmed was exactly what the CLA-defined supplementary benefit entitlement qualified as.