A written employment contract is not required under the German Law on the Proof of Conditions of Employment (Nachweisgesetz). However, the law requires that verbal employment contracts be documented within a certain period of time. The aim of the law is to increase transparency in the employment relationship and to regulate the burden of proof in the event of disputes between employee and employer.
The German Law on Proof is an important law that protects the rights of employees and obliges employers to record the essential contents of the contract in writing. Employment contracts do not have to be in writing, which means that employers and employees can agree on the essential contents of the contract orally. However, the so-called Proof of Employment Act (Nachweisgesetz) already existed before August 1, 2022, which obliged the employer to provide the employee with a written record of the essential contents of the contract no later than one month after the oral contract was concluded.
Even before the law was changed, a violation of the Proof of Employment Act had the consequence that the burden of proof in labor court proceedings was reversed. However, the law change on August 1, 2022, added further mandatory content that should be sensibly included in an employment contract in writing.
One of the significant changes concerns the employee's job description. While it was sufficient before the change in the law to simply state in the employment contract what the employee was hired for, the employee's job must now also be briefly characterized. It is therefore no longer sufficient to write that the employee is hired in the purchasing department; the contract must also include job specifications such as negotiating contracts with suppliers or negotiating prices.
Another significant change concerns the regulation of breaks and rest periods in the employment contract. If no explicit agreement has been made in this regard, it is advisable to simply incorporate the break regulations from the Working Hours Act into the employment contract. According to the Working Hours Act, employees who work more than six hours on a weekday are entitled to a 30-minute break, and those who work more than nine hours are entitled to a 45-minute break. Furthermore, there must be a break of at least eleven hours between the end of the daily working hours and the start of the new working hours the following day.
Shift workers must also be informed in their employment contract about the design of the shift system, including the length of the shifts, the duration of the shifts and under what conditions the shifts can be changed. Another important part of the employment contract concerns the termination and the termination procedure, as you will learn in our video.
The statements represent initial information that was current for the law applicable in Germany at the time of initial publication. The legal situation may have changed since then. Furthermore, the information provided cannot replace individual advice on a specific matter. Please contact us for this purpose.