Labor Relations with a Collective Bargaining Employer: Prospects of the Legal Regulation

Abstract

The article discusses two types of the new atypical forms of employment: strategic or ad hoc employee sharing which already exist in practice but fall outside of the scope of legal regulation in Russia. The author considers that strategic employee sharing, where a group of employers creates a joint structure for hiring the employees and coordinates the employer’s function between the companies and individuals, may be beneficial both for employers and employees. Employers who do not require a full-time employee and who are not aware in advance about the exact amount of the work time they require, may share assignment of work to one employee. In such cases they may minimize the risks of payment of wages for idle work and use the part-time labour more effectively. The employees, in their turn, reduce the risks or precarity of their employment compared to the situations, when they need to deal with each part-time employer individually. Besides that, using this scheme they avoid the risk of conflict of simultaneous work tasks from several part-time employers. The legalization of strategic employee sharing requires the establishment of certain legal rules, such as the regulation of minimum workload and maximum overall working time, the allocation of liability and the obligations concerning the wages’ payment by specific member of the group of employers etc. The ad hoc employee sharing may be mutually beneficial for employers and employees because of the similar reasons. Making this form of employment legal requires the establishment of maximum proportion of working time by the employee working for the secondary employer compared to the main one. Otherwise the ad hoc employee sharing may be used as a tool of abuse of rights analogous to the abuses performed within the temporary agency work legal framework. Besides that, the same safeguards as the ones provided to the employees working on the assignment of personnel contracts, are necessary for this type of employment relations. If these forms of work will be introduced into the Russian law, it will be possible to open the doctrinal discussion concerning the emergence of the new actor of labour law – a collective employer.