The fate of the employment relationship in companies in difficulty

The opening of insolvency proceedings is the occasion of a conflict between employment protection and survival of the company. Ensuring the sustainability of the latter often needs to be achieved at the cost of workforce reduction. This finding raises an issue which may, prima facie, appear somewhat paradoxical: while one of the objectives of the companies in difficulty is to ensure employment preservation, certain provisions tend to accelerate the delivery of redundancies. If the intrusion of insolvency law in an area that some consider restricted to labor law, may give rise to controversy, it has an explanation: the unsuitability of the second's constraints the company faces in a crisis situation could lead to the entity's shut down, and consequently, all the jobs that it carries. Finding ways of conciliation, sometimes considered contradictory, is necessary: ensuring the company's safeguard is the best way to preserve the jobs attached to it.