Right to participate in company parties

Right to participate in company parties
The Cologne Labor Court decided a remarkable case with a recent judgment dated June 22, 2017 (ref.: 8 Ca 5233/16). The tenor of the judgment is that the employer is sentenced to invite the employee to the 2017 company outing, the 2017 Christmas party and the 2018 carnival party. What happened?

About the topic:
The plaintiff in this case was employed as a manager for the defendant employer for many years. At the end of 2015, an agreement was reached to terminate the employment relationship with retirement, which is planned for February 28, 2018. The employee was released until retirement. The employee received a verbal promise that he could continue to take part in the usual Christmas parties, carnival parties and company outings. However, after a change in management, the company no longer wanted to hear about this commitment. Since the celebrations and excursions were obviously of considerable entertainment value, the employee sued. And he was right.
Legal assessment:
What is remarkable about the decision is that, in the end, the explicit promise that the employee could take part in company celebrations and outings during the leave of absence was not at all important. The Cologne Labor Court assumed that, based on the principle of equal treatment under labor law, an employee is in principle entitled to take part in company parties, provided that these are otherwise open to the company's employees. An individual employee can therefore only be excluded from participating in such company events for a specific reason. Such a factual reason can exist, for example, if an employee has “misbehaved” at such events in the past. However, this was not the case for the plaintiff in this case. The mutual exemption - according to the Cologne Labor Court - does not in itself constitute a factual reason for refusing the opportunity to participate in company parties and company outings.
In other words: Based on the principle of equal treatment under labor law, every employee is fundamentally entitled to be able to take part in company parties and outings that are generally organized for the employees of a company. The employer may only exclude individual employees from participation for an objective reason. In any case, an exemption in itself does not constitute an objective reason. This should also apply in the majority of cases in which it is not (as in the present case) a year-long exemption until retirement, but, as is usually the case, an exemption until it expires the notice period in the event of termination. Only in individual cases can the nature of the reasons for termination (particularly in the case of behavioral reasons) give rise to an objective reason for excluding the employee concerned from the company party.
With its legal opinion, the Cologne Labor Court follows the prevailing opinion in the labor law literature. To date, as far as can be seen, there has been no case law on this matter. However, the judgment of the Cologne Labor Court is not yet legally binding. It remains to be seen whether the employer will appeal and, if so, what the next instance will decide.
Conclusion:
If terminated employees are excluded from company celebrations such as Christmas parties or company outings due to an exemption and do not want to accept this, they can enforce their participation in the labor court. In fact, in practice it is anything but rare for employees who have been laid off and then released to be excluded from company parties. It is rare for employees to want to take part despite being terminated.
To round things off: Even if the employee has the right to enforce his participation in company parties, according to the prevailing opinion there is no corresponding obligation to participate. Conversely, an employer cannot force the employee to take part in unwanted company parties.
Link to the press release from the Cologne Labor Court:
http://www.lag-koeln.nrw.de/behoerde/presse/Pressemitteilungen/Arbeitsgericht-Koeln/Pressemitteilung08-17_ArbGK.pdf