The growing complexity of outsourcing transactions raises a variety of legal and regulatory challenges for large customer-orientated organisations and third party service providers, particularly when it comes to customer employees that work in outsourced functions (in-scope employees). Commonly, the customer no longer needs or wants to retain those in-scope employees unless it can redeploy them within its business.
With the rules governing outsourcing transactions scattered amongst general laws and regulations such as privacy, tax and employment laws, we developed the Global Outsourcing Employment Handbook to provide an overview of how these issues are dealt with in different countries.
Focusing on 19 countries, our handbook summarizes key issues for easy comparison. Each country chapter addresses the following questions:
- Are there laws/regulations/precedents excluding or limiting outsourcing?
- Are service providers obliged to employ the in-scope employees under certain circumstances?
- Is the concept of 'automatic employee transfers' recognised?
- In case of automatic employee transfers, is a service provider in principle required to honor existing terms and conditions/seniority?
- Do preconditions (e.g., information and consultation duties) apply in an automatic employee transfer scenario?
- If no automatic transfer applies, are there other ways for employees to transfer (e.g., by way of a termination/ rehire)?