Employment Conditions in Greece

For indefinite-term contracts, a probationary period of up to six months may be agreed at hiring, during which the contract is “under trial.” If the employer judges the trial unsuccessful, the contract may end during or at the end of the probation period, with time worked counting toward all rights accrued up to that point. If successful, seniority runs from the original hiring date.

For fixed-term contracts, probation must be proportionate, no more than one quarter of the contract term and capped at six months. All employment-law protections apply during probation.

Probation is separate from the 12-month no-severance threshold described in End of Employment.

Employers must give employees written information on the essential terms of employment:

• The parties
• The workplace
• The role
• The start date, and the end date if the contract is fixed-term
• The probation period
• Remuneration and pay frequency
• The working-time pattern
• Leave
• The termination procedure
• The applicable collective agreement
• The social insurance fund

The core items are due within a week of the start and the rest within a month, on paper or electronically, and the basic terms are uploaded to ERGANI II, the Ministry of Labour’s digital labour-information system, before the employee starts.

ERGANI II filings are made in Greek; contracts and payslips are in practice issued in Greek or bilingually.

A fixed-term contract ends on an objectively defined date, task or event. Renewal is unlimited only where there is an objective reason. Without one, successive fixed-term contracts with the same employee convert to an indefinite contract in either of two cases:

• They run beyond three years in total
• They are renewed more than three times within three years

Contracts count as successive where no more than 45 days separate them.

Greek statute does not regulate post-employment non-competes; they are assessed under general Civil Code principles. When assessing them, courts are likely to consider:

• Duration
• Geographic scope
• Scope of the restricted activity
• The employer’s legitimate interest
• Reasonable financial compensation to the employee

Recent Supreme Court case law treats reasonable compensation as a condition of validity for post-termination clauses. Restrictions of one to two years with proportionate compensation are typically upheld, while excessive clauses may be reduced rather than voided.

Local counsel should draft and review any non-compete clause.

Under Greek copyright law, the creator holds the rights in works made in the course of employment as the default position, with the important exception of software, where the economic rights in programs created by an employee in performing their duties belong to the employer unless agreed otherwise.

Contracts for creative and technical roles therefore include express IP assignment.

Businesses employing more than 70 people must adopt an internal work regulation (κανονισμός εργασίας) governing the employment relationship, drawn up with the enterprise union or works council where one exists and submitted to the Labour Inspectorate; the Ministry can extend the duty to employers with 40 or more staff.

Employers should keep working-time and payroll records through ERGANI II, including:

• Each employee’s working-time schedule must be filed in ERGANI II before it applies. If there is any change to it, the employer should file that on the day of the change, before the shift starts.
• Overtime above 45 hours a week must generally be declared before it starts. The first five hours beyond the standard 40-hour week are treated as additional work and do not require advance declaration. In the digital work card sectors using the retrospective system, unplanned overtime can instead be declared after it occurs.
• Leave taken, listed monthly

In covered sectors, employees use the digital work card to record the start and end of their working day, with working hours, breaks and overtime transmitted to ERGANI II in real time.

The Labour Inspectorate fines record-keeping and declaration breaches; an undeclared employee costs €10,500 per person.

On a transfer of business, employment contracts pass automatically to the new employer with all rights and obligations. The transferor remains jointly liable for pre-transfer debts; see more information in Employee Rights.