Spouses together in the workplace? The law sometimes forbids it<

If you have a husband and a wife and your common interests include work, it may happen that you work together at the same workplace. If you are both in the position of employees, everything is fine. However, a different situation arises when one of you wants to employ the other partner and works as a self-employed person (OSVČ).

Impossible during marriage

Accepting one's husband or wife into an employment relationship or under an agreement to perform work was already prohibited by the original Labor Code. He literally stated the wording: An employment-legal relationship cannot be established between spouses. The repealed Labor Code therefore established a ban on an employment-legal relationship that was to be established between persons who had already entered into marriage. If the spouses concluded an employment relationship between themselves, then it was an invalid legal act.

Nothing changed before the marriage

However, if you first entered into an employment relationship, in which one of the later spouses acts as an employer-self-employed person and the other as an employee, and only then did you get married, this could not this fact automatically means the end of this employment relationship. The Labor Code did not state this fact as a form of termination of the employment relationship or an agreement on work outside the employment relationship, nor as a reason for possible termination of the employment relationship by the employer. The employment relationship remained valid. And such a situation, when, for example, an employer - an entrepreneur marries his employee - for example, an assistant, was not and is not at all exceptional in practice.

The new Labor Code extends the prohibition to registered partners as well

The new Labor Code, valid from January 1, 2007, formulates the respective prohibition somewhat differently, namely in § 318 in conjunction with § 3: An employment relationship (i.e. an employment relationship, agreements on work performed outside the employment relationship) cannot be between spouses.

From January 1, 2008, this provision was then extended to registered partners of persons of the same sex. It is stated verbatim that the employment relationship (…) cannot be between spouses or partners ^51a)., while note 51a) refers to Act No. 115/2006 Coll., on registered partnership. However, the issue of the legal status of registered homosexuals is not the subject of our interpretation.

After the marriage, complications arise at work

The ban is thus broader and affects both the situation where one of the spouses would like to employ the other spouse, as well as the situation where an employment relationship is concluded between the employer and the female employee (employee) and only then does the marriage between them take place . Employment relationships concluded between spouses, provided that the employment relationship was first concluded and then the marriage was concluded, were valid until December 31, 2006. As of January 1, 2007, even these employment-legal relationships are invalid due to violation of the law.

Transitional provisions are missing

However, even according to the new Labor Code, the existence of a marriage is not a reason to dissolve an already existing employment relationship. But the Labor Code does not specify how and when the employment relationship between spouses should (or should) end.

Confusion with the sanctification of the law

However, after January 1, 2007, an employment relationship between spouses cannot (or should not) exist under any circumstances, not even one that was validly concluded before January 1 2007. According to the strict interpretation of the relevant provisions of the Labor Code, such an employment relationship must be terminated as of January 1, 2007. The new legislation is unnecessarily strict, confusing and basically useless!

Purely theoretically, a court can declare the invalidity of an employment relationship based on a lawsuit by one of the participants in the employment relationship. But it is unlikely that spouses in a situation where one employs the other will initiate such a dispute themselves, although it is not excluded.

The reason for the prohibition of the labor law relationship between spouses can probably be the existence of property community between the spouses - joint property. One spouse would use money from the community property to pay the other spouse's wages. At the same time, this money would remain in the common property. It wouldn't make much sense.

The ban only applies to self-employed persons (and their employees)

However, the above restrictions only apply to self-employed persons, i.e. natural persons - entrepreneurs as employers. It was and is possible for a husband to accept his wife or his husband's wife into an employment relationship, e.g. in a business company in which he himself acts as a statutory body (e.g. as an executive of a limited liability company), because the employment relationship or employment agreement held outside the employment relationship, it is not agreed between the spouses, but between the business company and one of the spouses. The husband can also participate in the other spouse's business as a cooperating person or a partner in a business company, etc.

Together in one workplace? Why not, but with reason

Labor legislation does not prohibit (and neither did the previous legislation effective on December 31, 2006) the employment of spouses in the same company or workplace, even in the position of superior and subordinate. Sometimes it is just right for both spouses to work for one employer, together at the same workplace, in the same operation, or even in a superior-subordinate relationship, e.g. in agriculture, trade and services, recreational facilities and elsewhere. On the other hand, it is completely undesirable for partnership ties to interfere with, for example, the company's control mechanisms (for example, for the wife to work as an accountant or storekeeper and the husband as a controller). The employer may establish a ban on the employment of spouses in the same workplace or in certain organizational links of the company in an internal regulation.

If the internal regulations of some employers, for example, stipulate that spouses cannot be employed in the same workplace in a superior-subordinate relationship, then this is not a requirement based directly on the Labor Code. From the point of view of the employee affected by such a measure, it could be discrimination on the grounds of marital and family status, if such a ban were not properly justified by the nature of specified work activities (types of work) that spouses may not perform at the employer, and other contexts in the given company.

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