Yes you can have temporary employment and part time. By law that should be in a contract, but employers frequently skip that, especially for seasonal work. The youth organization for the main labor organization run campaigns every year contacting kids at their summer jobs to see if they are getting everything they are entitled to by law, including a safe work environment.
Here’s a link to a Norwegian/English pdf of a sample labor contract from the Norwegian Labour Inspection Authority. It’s also available just in the two written forms of Norwegian and in Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Polish, Rumenian, Russian, Latvian, Estonian and Vietnamese, which says something about who the main guest workers here are.
Legal penalty, no, not at that level. But if it’s a single family own business rather than a grocery chain there might be “illegal” consequences. For instance the Norwegian holiday pay system means you are entitled to ~12% of the previous year’s wages as holiday pay, even after the end of your employment, and an employer could hold that back, making you go through the trouble of involving the legal system to get them to pay up.
And for more “important” positions your employer can sue you for breach of contract and you could be on the hook for the employer’s loss of profits as well as legal costs and fines. Theoretically you could be sentenced to prison for financial malfeasance, but I don’t think that’s ever happened.
Then you would hire people for a 6-month project, with the possibility of something more permanent if it’s a success. I worked for a government department in the UK, always doing the same job in the same place, but on a succession of 6-month contracts, either directly employed by them, or indirectly through an agency or similar arrangements. Temporary contracts like that are quite common.
AFAIK the rules on redundancy here don’t kick in for quite a while, at least as regards compensation:
The recruitment process is expensive and contractors typically demand a very high daily rate. It’s an expensive way to go if you’re actually anticipating needing permanent workers.
I’m not saying the potential problems are insurmountable, and I’m very much in favor of worker protections.
But there’s no getting around that they have some effect on labor fluidity.
I’m aware of a case here where the Employment Appeals Tribunal ruled that X’s ‘early retirement’ amounted to a dismissal, and as such, the dismissal was automatically ‘unfair’, and awarded him £20,000 - even as it simultaneously found that he had forged one of the other director’s signature on checks payable to himself for so-called ‘expenses’, and noted that it would have awarded him even more but for this.
Which is why most of those countries have a robust social safety net including unemployment benefits and free education.
There’s a lot to be said for a system that encourages well-suited employment, and education for it, rather than forcing desperate people to fling themselves like cannon fodder at every random opening. It’s a system that actually works for people other than shareholders.
This misses the point. Severance pay is (a) mandated by law in most countries and (b) money owed. It’s no different than services rendered.
The legal logic in Canada I assume borrows from the British common law. Unions and some professional or managerial jobs have explicit contracts that may include terms relating to notice, firing processes and appeal processes, and more mundane things like pay and overtime, etc. (Note mostly contracts cannot sign away labour standards rights - i.e. overtime - just clarify them. A contract too biased to the employer risks being tossed in court as egregious.)
Most employment here does not have a contract; a new employee signs a paper stating they have read and understand HR policies. If there is no formal contract (most lower level jobs) then the law assumes there is an “implied contract”. Thus, if a process is HR policy, or has been followed for a while, or for other employees in the same situation, the implication is it also applies for Bob or Alice. Changing terms of employment too significantly risks the employee winning a “constructive dismissal” suit.
So if Fred and Ted were caught sleeping on the job and simply reprimanded, then Bob might win a wrongful termination suit if he is fired instead. However, if the employer issues a new policy “From now on, anyone caught sleeping on the job will be fired” and then catches Bob, he could fire him without hesitation. (Usually, in a big company, HR will also have everyone sign something saying they’ve read and are aware of this new policy.) Nobody will win a court case, for example, by arguing that the change in sleeping-on-the-job policy is so onerous a change that they have been constructively dismissed.
I recall a news article a few decades ago about someone who won a big court case in Britain over exactly this - they were caught sleeping on the job and were fired, and argued that others had been caught and not fired.
Here, as soon as that contract got renewed the third time, even if it was through a different avenue, you would automatically be considered a full-time employee and all legal protections would kick in. And a permanent employee with two years on the job already, at that.
Fixed-term contracts are intended for where the actual work is of limited duration. The bit I bolded makes it clear this was not the case for you. The labour courts here take a very dim view of that kind of attempted cleverness.
Although most government employees are union workers here, so that kind of shenanigans doesn’t usually happen for them.
I had a friend years ago who was a temporary employee on 6-month contracts working with the sheriff’s office transporting prisoners. When two years continuous as a temp were up he would become a permanent employee according to the union agreement. A union steward helpfully sent a letter to management reminding them this was about to happen, and the department terminated his contract a few days before the 2-year anniversary.
That’s just not true though. Like Patrick says, for that sort of job you’d usually hire people on a six month contract. And in the UK - we can’t talk about Europe as if it’s all got the same rules - redundancy pay doesn’t even apply until they’ve been working for you for two years, so it won’t cost you a penny.
<On first draft I responded to this post with arguments, but because of the mod instruction I have removed the discussion part of my post.
I am just going to clarify the example because I think it has been misparsed a couple of times now.>
I was not talking about a planned project of 6 months, I was talking about hiring staff on a presumed permanent basis, and then finding later you need to downsize. And 6 months was probably a poor choice for “later”. Think of some period of time that isn’t a typical contract period.
OK, but without getting argumentative, I hope you’ve noticed that there wouldn’t be any massive redundancy costs, there would be zero if it’s less than two years. After two years it’s one week’s pay for each year, so two weeks’ pay for two years, etc - it really isn’t the kind of sums of money that would put a business off starting up a project.
The point is, your livelihood is an important part of your place in society and who you are. Stability is important. This is why there is protection in every other country except the USA. It’s the same as your place of abode being important - most jurisdictions also have rules that it’s very difficult for a landlord to simply tell a tenant for no good reason “you’re out of here within a week!”
If it costs money, it’s the cost of doing business. “Gee, what will it cost me to pull the plug on this enterprise?” is a pretty crappy approach to employment and likely is rarely a consideration. A week per year is 1/52, or 2%. Cheap.
The point being, it’s not impossible to close down an enterprise and lay everyone off. It just costs a bit more - 2% more than was already spent on wages over the life of the project. less, if there’s been turnover.
And keep in mind, that’s if the employer tells the employees to go. If they go of their own volition, no severance is due. (Which brings up a whole separate issue about people being “persuaded” to leave. Or, Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, mentions in one of his books about the fellow Wally was modelled on - who was trying to annoy his boss enough to get offered a redundancy package, which apparently is actually a thing in the USA for some situations. )
And here such obvious bullshit would end up in front of the CCMA or Labour Court and more than likely land up with that person reinstated in a permanent post and probably punitive measures for the company. Note how the " past renewals of fixed term contracts" sets a reasonable expectation of renewal in the Court’s eyes.
As I understand it, except in egregious situations, the union contract clarifies with precise wording what may be imprecise situations. For example, in Canada, renewing a term contract over and over (see my mention of the rabbi with 20 1-year contracts) can be construed as continuous employment. However, exactly how long is not stated in laws or labour standards. It was precedent from a court decision, “on-going employment cannot hide behind the fiction of a 1-year contract”. (Perhaps differently in Britain) As a result, when a union contract clarifies this, it becomes the applicable precise rule. If the union had wanted the rule to include “or if the person is let go in 23 months” they would have included it in the contract. If they had meant “when the contract is renewed or extended for the third time” they would have said so in the contract.
I knew a girl in college who worked part time in a Shoppers Drug Mart in Toronto in the early 1970’s. The (cheap) franchise owner took advantage of a loophole in labour law of the day to basically fire and rehire his staff every 6 months so he did not have to pay vacation pay. (Long since then has been an illegal move)
In France it’s pretty much impossible to get hired for a permanent post much under age 30, and employers think very hard about new hires because its very difficult to lay them off again.
In Germany, generous (for employees) protection from dismissal has led to three main reactions on the employers’ side to circumvent it: Outsourcing of functions to external service providers (sometimes to one-person companies owned and run by people who would otherwise be employees); part-time and fixed-term contracts; and excessive overtime work. It really is as in any other field of legislation: If you regulate something, you will provoke behaviour to circumvent it. And if the legislation protects people from dismissal, then the response will be that employers, instead of hiring people when there’s a lot of work to do, look for ways to get people to do that work in a manner that allows them to be laid off when business slows down.
Canada has seen that sort of trick with contract workers. (It’s a contntious issue with people like Uber and Doordash 'employees" too, and led to court cases in Canada and the USA.) There’s a list of criteria that establish whether a person is a contractor or an employee - things like, do they set their own hours (within reason), how closely do they report to a supervisor, do they earn more than 80% of their contract income from one employer? The big issue here (and I presume, the USA) is that employers are required to deduct assorted payroll taxes whereas contractors are responsible for all the taxes. The concern is that someone may neglect to pay their own taxes, whereas large corporations are pretty reliable tax collectors.
My experience was that mainly “contract workers” are temporary actual employees of a contracting firm that provided them to the corporation. Acme Programming, for example, will provide programmers to a large corporation and pay them half what the large corporation would to the permanent employees they work beside, plus no benefits. Meanwhile, Acme will collect almost twice as much as they pay their employees. Everyone wins except the working stiffs who actually produce something.