Termination of Contract Labour - creating issues in the plant and posting wrong things about the company on Facebook

One of my contract labour (on contractor roll) creating issues in the plant and posting wrong things about the company on Facebook his intent is always to create problems for management and form unions. I wanted to understand how we can terminate the employee.

Dear Neeraj,

What exactly is the misconduct done by the contract employee? "Creating issues in the plant" is a vague term and does not explicitly describe the nature of the misconduct.

Do you have approved standing orders for your company? If yes, then you may check the list of the misconducts mentioned in the orders and find out under what misconduct the contract employee is liable for the disciplinary action. If your company does not have approved standing orders, then you may refer to the model standing orders, and issue the show-cause notice.

In fact, terminating the services of the contract employee is easy as all that is required is to send a letter to the contractor stating your company does not wish to avail of the service of the particular employee. However, as this contract employee appears to be a troublemaker, you may follow a process of handling the indiscipline.

Thanks,

Dinesh Divekar

Dear Neeraj,

There is no contract of employment between a principal employer and a contract labor engaged through a contractor in his establishment. Therefore, as principal employer you cannot assume any disciplinary control over his performance or behaviour. If you strongly feel that his presence in your establishment is not desirable because of his activities as mentioned in the post, better ask the contractor to replace him with a suitable substitute.

The whole purpose of having contractors for contract labour is that you do not have the hassle of legal procedure in case of the employees and they are not permanent.

So all you need to do is to inform the contractor (preferably orally) that you no longer want this particular employee and he needs to be replaced immediately.

It will be the work of the contractor to take the legal steps.
However, be aware that if this person is trying to form a union, the legal problem will be gone, but he will definitely continue to stir up problems. So your HR / IR team must be ready to tackle the problem he creates

In Indian Industry culturally the contract labour though engaged through contractor has a feeling of employee of the Principal Employer. Moreover, most of the Contractors are lack of knowledge about labour laws, disciplinary procedure etc. Usually those Contractors after receiving information from PE, inform the contract labour as if it is the decision of PE to terminate his job.

Under the above circumstances it is always better to advise contractor to settle the score with the contract labour amicably and if necessary to pay some token compensation to stop all nuisance activities.

Usually the permanent employees have some mental support towards the contract labour and if there is Union it becomes further complicated. This is reality in most of the organizations.

S K Bandyopadhyay ( WB, Howrah)
CEO--USD HR Solutions
98310 8131