Understanding the ban on the “cumul des mandats” – The French legal regime prohibiting concurrent mandates as worker director and employee representative

French legislation grants the employees of large groups the right to elect one or two employee representatives on the company board, but it also obliges the latter, once appointed, to resign from any other mandates they may hold as employee representatives within the group, as soon as they take up their seat on the board. This “non-cumul des mandats” rule prohibiting employees from holding concurrent mandates also applies when the EWC elects one of the two employee representatives on the board, thus requiring the elected member to relinquish their seat on the EWC, as well as any national and/or local mandates they may hold. In a study published by the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), Stéphane Vernac, Professor of Private Law at Jean Monnet University, Saint-Étienne, re-examines this legislation and discusses its compatibility with EU law in particular. It seems hard to challenge the logic of the incompatibility rule, even though the author emphasises a few flaws in it. The study encourages companies to be more transparent in their appointment processes, and also to ensure that employee representatives who become board members are granted an equivalent level of redundancy protection to that enjoyed by workforce representatives, if they are deprived of such protection when forced to relinquish their national and/or local mandates.