Woman sacked for working remotely from France loses appeal
What happens to your UK job rights if you move to France
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A woman has lost an employment tribunal claim over unfair dismissal after the UK company she worked for fired her after she moved to France and continued working remotely from her French home.
Iryna Malyk worked for Teleperformance Contact Ltd as a regional finance business partner (Europe) from May 2022 until her dismissal in August 2024.
Her contract described her main place of work as her “home office”. The company’s Bristol office closed in September 2022, after which she worked entirely from home.
Then, in June 2024, Ms Malyk told her manager that her husband had found work in France and she wanted to move there. She asked whether she could continue working from France or move to a French contract.
However, her manager told her she could not work permanently from France under her UK contract and that there was no suitable position for her in France.
The company said that employing her from France would create legal and tax issues and that it was not financially viable to move her to a French contract.
Ms Malyk nevertheless moved to France in July 2024 and continued to work from there. The company told her that she was required to work from the UK but she continued to work from France.
She was then investigated before being dismissed in August 2024.
Ms Malyk challenged the dismissal, arguing that her contract allowed her to work from home and did not expressly say that her home had to be in the UK.
What did the tribunal decide?
The employment tribunal found that the dismissal was fair and that Ms Malyk’s contract did not give her the right to work from anywhere in the world.
Although the contract did not specifically say that she had to work in the UK, it gave her home address as Bristol, described her main workplace as her “home office” and contained references to UK law and her eligibility to work in the UK.
The company dismissed her for what employment law calls “some other substantial reason”, a potentially fair reason for dismissal under the UK Employment Rights Act 1996.
The tribunal accepted the employer's concern that it could not continue employing Ms Malyk permanently in France under her UK contract because of the potential legal consequences in France.
However, the tribunal did say that it would have been helpful if the company had given Ms Malyk more specific information about the legal risks at an earlier stage.
Why is working remotely from France different?
The case does not mean that a UK employee can never work remotely from France.
It does show though that an employee who is allowed to work from home cannot assume that they can move that home to another country without their employer's agreement.
There can also be tax and social-security consequences when an employee starts working permanently in France for a foreign employer.
Urssaf (France’s social security body) says that where a foreign company has no establishment in France but employs a worker who falls under the French social security system, the company must declare the employee and pay the relevant social security contributions in France.
Tax can also be affected. Someone who moves permanently to France and lives there for more than 183 days a year will generally be considered a French tax resident and will normally have to pay tax in France on their income, subject to the rules of the UK-France tax treaty.
