Developments in social legislation and policy in the Czech Republic in reaction to the financial crises
Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to describe and analyse how the Czech welfare state was changed in reaction to the financial crises. It is difficult to select a few important legal changes in Czech labour law from many which happened from 2008 until 2015.
Nevertheless, seeing from a labour law perspective, a tendency towards increased flexibility that ended with the entrance of the new Czech Civil Code into effect stays at the top of the charts (further analysed as part 3). To the contrary, in collective employment law two legal changes that demonstrate a rather restrictive approach towards collective rights will be described (part 4).
The rather unclear approach toward flexibility in private law has been coupled with some changes in public employment policy (part 5). In social security law, the Czech Republic has attempted to launch austerity programmes in pension insurance law (part 6 and 7) and re-balance health care spending (part 8 of this chapter).