One of the most relevant legal news of this year was brought by the amendment to Act No. 311/2001 Coll. Labour Code as amended or Act No. 91/2010 Coll. on Promotion of Tourism, which is based on the employer’s duty to provide its employee, whose uninterrupted employment at such employer is longer than or equal to 24 months, a holiday contribution to be used in the territory of Slovakia. Under the currently applicable and effective act, the employers employing more than 49 employees have such duty (upon the opinion of the Slovak Ministry of Labour, Social Affairs and Family, duly employed employees are taking into account only, i.e. the so-called agreement workers are not taken into account for specification of the relevant number of employees).
In terms of the current legal arrangement, entrepreneurs will think thoroughly about employing the fiftieth worker, since quite high financial costs may occur to them in later periods, whereas the number of employees is assessed as the average recorded number of employees for the previous calendar year.
The sum of employer’s contribution to the employee’s holidays
Under the law, employers are obliged to contribute to their employees’ holidays in the sum of 55% of respective costs, but not more than EUR 275 for the calendar year. Indeed, full-time employees will receive the maximum sum only. Employers shall contribute to half-time employees’ holidays in the maximum sum of EUR 137.50 per calendar year.
Under the new regulation, the aforementioned duty should be applicable to all employers, i.e. also to at least 142,000 micro and small enterprises that were exempted from such duty under the act saying that the limiting number of employees is 49 and more; such enterprises thus could, but were not obliged to provide their employees holiday contributions. Upon the data of the Register of Organizations, there are 723,496 employees employed in micro and small enterprises including natural persons – entrepreneurs.
As resulting from the survey performed by Profesia, s. r. o. on the sample of 10,450 Slovak citizens at the beginning of 2018, 46.10% of respondents are employed at their employers for longer than 24 months. Although representativeness of the sample was not verified, we can use this per cent value for our purposes due to the lack of official data as the estimate of real share of working people employed at their employers for longer than 24 months. The estimated number of employees entitled to holiday contributions thus represents approximately 333,532 persons.
Minimum costs in the sum of up to EUR 89.1 million
As also resulting from the data of the Statistical Office of the SR for the last quarter of 2018, 94.34% of all employed persons in Slovakia are full-time employees. Upon the aforementioned assumptions, we estimate that the total number of full-time employees employed at the same employer for longer than 24 months is 314,653. Estimated costs of employers from categories of micro and small enterprises for full-time employees are EUR 86,529,575. For purposes of our calculation, we suppose that the remaining 5.66% are half-time employees representing 18,877 employees in total. Estimated costs of employers for half-time employees represent EUR 2,595,588. Overall estimated costs of employers from categories of micro and small enterprises for all employees are EUR 89,125,163.