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hiring someone in france


oemodm
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Hi,

If I wanted to hire someone casually, for a month or 2, to do general garden work, labouring, how would I do this locally?

Let's say someone from a forum or locally, agreed to work for whatever fee. How would I pay them legally? I guess if there were autoentrepreneur it could work? And for insurance they would sign something to say if they got injured doing any light work, they have their own medical/health insurance.

Probably a really stupid question but I could hire someone for a couple of months for general labouring and garden work.

thanks
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When we arrived in France in 2002 in all innocence I put an ad in the local paper for someone to do that kind of work. We were inundated with replies (phone) and found a very good man (french) who  worked for us for several years. We just paid him cash, not realising it was illegal.
After about 8 years we moved to another house in the same dept., and he said he couldn't continue to work for us. I wonder if the tax people had caught up with him?
We could have been fined too, for not paying the employer's part of the tax.

He remained a good friend, socially, and full of good advice.

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I have no idea about non residents using CESU.

I remember when it started and all I thought one had to do 'then' was have a french bank account so that the right amount could be debited from the bank account with the charges included on it, and the employee, got the amount they were entitled to.

Then ofcourse, the employer, could claim against their tax bill, but if one doesn't pay tax in France, then one doesn't pay tax in France, then what is debited from one's account, then that's the bill.

Just how I thought it worked, but I may be wrong....... I often am.

AND at the time, it seemed like a cheaper way of employing someone than using a fully registered artisan.

I seem to remember that there were changes in the recent past and that is for the OP to look up isn't it, or just go to the pages jaunes and get an artisan, who would be more costly?

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it is so bl*****dy complicated.

even if i use cesu, its limited in number of hours + consecutive weeks + there's risk of the employer being sued for rights or something.

I wonder if there is an agent that takes a small %, and can handle all the admin for cesu.

I need to hire someone full time, for 3 months. An artisan would be around 5000EUR a month (I get day rate quotes of 200/250 day).
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Yet another spanner for your works. If you're talking about over summer, you may well find that you can't find anyone prepared to work those 3 months. Just as all French people lunch at the same time, they all tend to holiday at the same time and the received wisdom is that If you want stuff doing it won't get done in July or August. Just saying.
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It very much depends on what you want the labour for as well as the idea of a Jack of all trades doesn’t exist in France whatever you might have seen on UK TV programmes. If it’s renovation you could employ a maître d’ouvre to organise the workmen but you’re not going to find one person who will fix the leaking roof, cut the grass, fix an oil leak on the car and do a bit of shopping.
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You're quite right, idun...

There is nothing stopping a non-resident employing someone and paying them through the CES.

You set it up through the URSSAF website, and then each month declare the hours the person has worked and how much you have paid. They get the money, and URSSAF take a further sum (almost the same amount again!) for your employee's cotisations.

BUT - unlike permanent French residents - you can't offset any of the extra amount against your income tax.

(Well, it occurs to me that if you DID have any income from letting a gite, say, then maybe you could offset some of it; but I didn't, so I didn't need to go into that.)

I had an occasional gardener whom I paid to cut the grass in my absence. I wanted to be quite sure that nothing was going to come back on me if he should cut his foot off with my mower etc, so although it was expensive, it did give me peace of mind.

EDIT

Only just seen page 2 of this thread...

Yes, I am sure the number of hours a week a CES can cover is limited. It's not designed for full-time work. Just for a few hours ironing, piano-teaching, gardening, etc in your own home using your own equipment/materials.

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At the end of the day - workers have rights in France, more so than in the UK. If you want someone to work full time for you for 3 months, then you have to respect those rights.

If there were loopholes in the law that offered an easy way round paying their dues, then lots of employers would take the loophole to save money at the worker's expense. But in fact, French employment law is pretty watertight, they take workers' rights seriously here.
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Would that that was exactly true Eurotrash, I know of one big UK company, that works a loophole and gets away with paying it's staff peanuts whilst they are working in France. And they have two sets of books, as seen by someone I know who took such a job.

When I mentioned this once, with far more detail, quite a few told me that that was 'quite normal'. It isn't but that doesn't stop it existing.

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Well you can't stop people ignoring the rules if they want to take their chances.

Salaried workers who are employed to work in France have to be declared in advance to the French authorities via SIPSI, and AFAIK there is no loophole apart from that up to very recently this wasn't policed. They have to be paid French minimum wage and their employment contracts and working conditions have to comply with French labour law. If they have S1s then their social security/pension etc contributions continue to be paid in the UK so that is a saving, but if they don't have S1s then the employer has to contribute in France.

UK companies have been getting away with it for years by simply ignoring the requirements, but as of 2018 France started tightening up on this. I have a couple of clients at the moment who are being investigated by DIRECCTE and are appealing against the fines purely on the grounds that they can't pay them. The fine for each contravention is around 1,500 euros and there are separate fines for failing to declare a worker on SIPSI, failing to pay minimum wage/union rates, failing to issue a French payslip, failing to have a contract translated into French, failure to record working hours, exceeding permitted weekly working hours, etc etc etc; multiplied by the number of workers, multiplied by the number of contracts each worker has been on, and if like my clients you've been employing dozens of workers for years in blissful ignorance of the rules, the potential fines get up to millions of euros in no time.

https://www.sipsi.travail.gouv.fr/SipsiCasFo/login?service=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sipsi.travail.gouv.fr%2FSipsiFO

"All employers based outside France with the intention of providing services in France must submit a prior declaration of posting of its workers to the labour inspectorate branch of the place where the service is to be provided, before the posting gets underway."

Doesn't leave much of a loophole, does it.
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It's general diy. Gardening work, moving bricks, a bit of digging, a bit moving wood. Just general DIY work. Some people want to work in summer, some dont. I think this direction is dead, since cesu is limited + risky with rights.
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Eurotrash, I don't make this stuff up, and some things fall between the cracks.

I contacted the Inspection de Travail and UK equivalent and in spite of this 'fantastic' EU, neither would get involved because..............

And there was a french set of books in France showing everything above board, and another set for the UK employer.

Was this specific company 'chancing it', only sort of or not really, as the authorities in both countries were not interested. The staff were working for £1 an hour plus lodging and food. And if you think that french staff in say ski ressorts or other holiday places work for that much, think on. And they get conned too, but NEVER to that extent.

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Could you employ someone on a short-term contract to do the work, I wonder?

Also, I seem to remember, in the canton where my holiday home was, that people could hire someone from some kind of sheltered employment scheme - sorry, can't remember its initials - to do very basic work.

EDIT

It,looks as if there might be a way via the URSSAF. Maybe this would be helpful:

https://www.urssaf.fr/portail/home/particulier-employeur/particulier-employeur/travailleur-occasionnel.html

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Idun, I know you don't make this stuff up, but I would be interested to know how recent this was? Because now SIPSI has been set up it is a lot easier for DIRECCTE to check whether posted workers have been declared or not, and posted worker fraud has become a main focus. In 2018 for the first time DIRECCTE were set targets of how many contrôles to carry out, apparently the targets were raised in 2019, and the government still seems to think it needs to do more to combat posted worker fraud in the future.

https://www.vie-publique.fr/actualite/alaune/cour-comptes-enquete-efficacite-lutte-contre-fraude-au-travail-detache.html.

Contrôles involve talking to workers, requiring to see copies of their contracts, payslips (French version), evidence that the amount it says on the payslip has been paid into their banks, record of working hours, etc etc etc. It is a real thorough crackdown, and I imagine that if they find evidence of deliberate fraud as opposed to simply ignoring the rules, they'll deal with it accordingly.

One of my clients was down south and the works inspector there was very cooperative and is now working with them to ensure they get it right in future. The other is in northern France and the works inspector they had to deal with was only interested in finding as many violations as he could, you couldn't get two more different approaches.
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I do know that some things have improved somewhat over the last couple of years.

But it is still a long way from being good. I do know someone who works with seasonal workers and they tell me that there is still imaginative book keeping.

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