Parisian companies, “La Direccte” can help you manage the bad weather
Office Space news by BURO Club

News of the 19/03/2018

Floods and heavy snowfall, the French region Île-de-France underwent significant paralysis at the beginning of the year. The first impacted were companies: employees and customers could not come to offices, some of them were simply unable to work (transport, delivery). The Regional Directorate of Companies, Competition, Consumer Affairs, Labor and Employment (Direccte for Direction régionale des entreprises, de la concurrence, de la consommation, du travail et de l’emploi) of Île-de-France region set up a crisis unit. BURO Club, hosting many companies in its office spaces for rent in Paris and the Paris region, wants to keep businesses informed about the solutions available to them in times of weather-related crisis.

Case by case solutions

If your business was affected (or still is) by this crisis, please be aware that the Direccte offers three levers that could help with your situation:

• The exceptional nature of bad weather allows the use of partial activity, meaning you can decide to place your employees on short-time unemployment for the duration of events. This opens the right to use partial activity allowances;
• You can request an exception to the work hours limit in case of repairs needing to be made or simply to catch up with up with the workload;
• You may postpone your tax or social contributions for a while, to avoid an overdraft and to allow your activity to catch up (you are still indebted, but you’ll be able to pay at a later date).

For any further information, write to idf.continuite-eco@direccte.gouv.fr, this emergency cell will help you deal with your own case. To date, only a hundred companies have appealed, but it is expected that thrice that amount will follow.

On the employee side

If your workforce has been unable to go to work through this case of force majeure, employers must be aware that it is not possible to punish them. Several solutions are available to you and to the employees to ensure the continuity of the work, consequently, of the salary:

• You decide that employees can occasionally work from home. Any means of certifying it will be valid: SMS, telephone confirmation, e-mails, etc. In which case, counting days of absence and taking them off their salary is out of the question.
• The employee may choose to exceptionally take those days as paid leaves rather than absences;
• You can decide together that the employee will catch up on the missed hours, also to avoid a payroll deduction.

The situation seems to be back to normal for the snows and floods through February. Stay tuned to prefectural statements to be informed if a new alert comes up.