The Legal 500

1. Is it common for employees to be offered participation in an employee share plan?
About 30% of all companies based in Luxembourg offer an employee share plan to some or all of their employees.
2. Is it lawful to offer participation in an employee share plan where the shares to be acquired are shares in a foreign parent company?

In these financially precarious times, it is an unfortunate reality that more and more people in Luxembourg (as elsewhere) are having recourse to unemployment benefit as companies downsize to cope with the crisis. It is important therefore to know our rights to unemployment benefit (chômage) often for peace of mind as much for anything else. This article shall deal only with employees (salariés). Self-employed people can receive unemployment benefit (contrary to popular opinion) but this shall not be treated here. It must be stated from the outset that social security legislation is horrendously complex and intricate and each particular case must be judged on its merits. A general overview shall, however, try to be given here.

In these somewhat uncertain economic times, the spectre of redudancies is in evreyone's mind. This stands in contrast with the situtaion of the employment market, which is characterised by a shortage of manpower, where one of the biggest HR challenges is to attract and retain talent...

The European Court of Justice ruled on 19 June 2008, that certain provisions of the law of 20 December 2002 implementing Directive 96/71/CE relating to the posting of workers (integrated into the articles L.141-1 and following of the Labour Code) were contrary to European law, in particular to the principle of freedom to provide services.

The Luxembourg market is characterized by the major role played by the frontier workers (Belgian, French and German) who form more than 50% of the labour force working within the territory. The unemployment rate amongst Luxembourg workers amounts to approximately 4,5% (2008).