Judges Crack Down on Inaction and Falsehoods in German Employment Cases

A compliance officer who sat on a whistleblower’s report now faces the consequences of his silence. In a 2025 ruling, the Offenbach Labor Court (Case No. 1 Ca 136/25) upheld the dismissal of a chief lawyer who also served as the company’s compliance officer. An employee had alerted him in October 2023 to illegal practices at a precious-metals recycling operation, but the executive took no action.

The fallout was severe. The company was forced to set aside €457.7 million in provisions, and prosecutors are now investigating on suspicion of fraud. The court described the officer’s inactivity as a grave breach of duty — one that justified termination without prior warning.

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Dishonesty in court can also cost a worker their job, as a bus driver recently discovered. The Cologne Regional Labor Court ruled on January 15, 2026 (Case No. 6 SLa 315/25) that fabricating a telephone conversation during a wrongful-dismissal hearing gave the employer grounds for a fresh, independent termination. No prior written warning was required, the judges stated, because lying under oath represents a severe violation in itself.

When a crime is merely suspected, employers still have room to act. The Lower Saxony Regional Labor Court, on January 15, 2025 (Case No. 2 SLa 31/24), confirmed the summary dismissal of a shift supervisor who had been with the company since 1995. He was suspected of using company equipment to carry out private jobs. The employer had questioned roughly 150 staff across the operation. The court approved the mass inquiry, adding: “Data protection must not be misconstrued as protection for perpetrators.”

Meanwhile, the battle over working-time recording heats up in Berlin’s schools. The Education and Science Union (GEW) has announced legal action after the city senate failed to introduce a binding system for logging teachers’ hours. A University of Göttingen study published in June 2025 found that Berlin teachers put in roughly 100 extra hours annually — a collective two million unpaid overtime shifts each year. The staff council has already called in the arbitration board.

In a separate development, Microsoft is rolling out a new feature for Teams that automatically tracks employees’ work time and location via the company Wi-Fi network. The deployment is expected to conclude by end of June 2026. Workers can object, but administrators must first activate the system.

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Not every dismissal-related claim succeeds. The Hamm Regional Labor Court, on February 19, 2026 (Case No. 15 SLa 800/25), dismissed an employer’s damages suit. A worker had deleted 19,000 emails during a plant shutdown, but the court found that paper files and backups still existed — no concrete loss could be proved.

A bakery in Upper Austria also failed to get its way. The Chamber of Labour secured a €1,963 back-payment for a former employee whom the bakery had, after an unlawful dismissal, unilaterally offset negative hours against holiday days. The worker advocates stressed that short-time due to low orders is the employer’s risk, and vacation time can only be set by mutual agreement.

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