Posted by By : Anas Aloulabi – Legal Consultant
anas.aloulabi@albaharadocates.ae
During the year 2017 our firm Al Bahar Advocates & Legal Consultants witnessed a huge increase in labor cases, that probably exceeded 50%.
The cases mainly had the same subject, which’s the termination of the employment relationship, and most of the cases were submitted by the employees against the employers. And in general most of the cases the employees were claiming a 3 months compensation from their terminators.
Viewing these cases, one can immediately recognizes that most of the employers and the employees were ignorant of the UAE’s Labor Law’s provisions, as most of the employers were using mistakenly article no.120 of the Labor Law to terminate the contracts, without taking into consideration the conditions contained into that article.
Article no.120 constitutes multiple cases for the termination of the employment. The most likely that the employers use for expelling their employees is item (c) which provides:
“‘If the employee commits a default, that caused a serious and material losses to the employer, provided that the employer informs the labor department of the incident within 48 hours from the time of his knowledge of this occurrence.”
And unfortunately due to the ignorance of the employers of the reality of this article they just terminate their employees without informing or notifying the Labor Department at all.
As a guideline for the employers the courts have decided that the notifying manner of the Labor Department could be by any provable mean, ie: the employer can send an ordinary email from his outlook to the Labor Department’s email containing a short description to the incident. Thus the employer can cover the formalities provided by article 120/c and the outcome of any future labor case by the employee would be jeopardized of failure. Since article no. 120 deprives the employee not to claim the notice period that was not served by the employer, but also from the End Of Service Gratuity according to article no.139 of the same law.
This piece of information is a part of multiple guidelines presented to the employers in UAE, in general and in Dubai in particular to work in its light.
In my next article i’ll focus on other terms of termination provided by article 120 of the labor law especially item (e) thereof where the seriousness of litigation is evident.