The ‘Renault act’ – Belgian legislation in case of mass layoffs

The law on mass layoffs – known as the “Renault Act” – dates back to February 13, 1998.  Whereas the previous collective agreement (1976) didn’t prevent businesses from closing a plant during the day, this law tried to make the information/consultation procedure before any mass layoff more substantial and more effective.  Here is a description of the procedure with a view to improving our resource center.

To give a little more body to this description, we have interviewed Annick Hellebuyck, social affairs advisor at the Federation of Enterprises of Belgium and Michael Venturi, from the FGTB metalworkers’ federation in Wallonia-Brussels (MWV-FGTB).  For the former, this law should “guarantee the procedure’s effectiveness out of respect for the workers and to give them time to understand and accept the situation, and to do the link between collective consultation and individual layoffs via collective disputes when rules are not complied with.”  Unions claim the law should go further than simply complying with the information/consultation procedure.  Venturi said, “In theory, this law was primarily supposed to give employee representatives the possibility of proposing a true economic and industrial alternative to have all their chances of successfully maintaining employment.”

When is it triggered?

Mass layoff means any layoff, for one or several ground(s) that has (have) nothing to do with the individual worker (namely economic and technical reasons in the broad sense) affecting,…