Duty to Flag Urgent Work When Calling in Sick
- 8 hours ago
- 3 min read
Under German law, anyone calling in sick owes the employer only two pieces of information: that they will be absent, and for roughly how long. Many employment contracts ask for more and require a simultaneous notice of any urgent work left open. The Baden-Württemberg Regional Labour Court (Landesarbeitsgericht) holds a clause of that kind to be void (partial judgment of 19 February 2026, case no. 8 Sa 25/25).
1. The Case: A Written Warning After Calling in Sick
In September 2024, an employee working in goods receiving left his workplace because he had fallen ill, and he notified his supervisor by email.
What he did not mention: preliminary material still had to go into storage that day, and without it three orders could not be shipped to customers the following day. Delivery was delayed by one day.
His employment contract obliged him, when reporting an absence, to “simultaneously point out any urgent work”. The company issued a written warning (Abmahnung). The employee sued to have it removed from his personnel file.
2. The Decision: Two Grounds for Invalidity
The clause fails the review that applies to standard contract terms, and it does so on two counts.
First, the court considers it non-transparent. Which tasks count as “any urgent work” cannot be determined reliably. Does it turn on the time of the sickness notification, on the expected length of the absence, or on whether colleagues could still take the task on that same day? Anyone calling in sick risks breaching a duty whose scope they do not know.
Second, the clause places the employee at an unreasonable disadvantage. There is no statutory duty to point out urgent matters when reporting sick, and the Federal Labour Court (Bundesarbeitsgericht) has not established such a rule either. On top of that, the clause draws no distinction according to whether the company already knows about those matters or could readily find out about them itself. In such cases there is no legitimate interest in an additional report from the employee who has fallen ill.
If the clause is void, disregarding it is no breach of duty. The written warning therefore had to come out of the file.
3. The Limit: What Still Applies
The decision does not mean that employees owe no consideration at all while they are ill.
The general duty to avert harm to the employer (Section 241(2) of the German Civil Code, BGB) remains in place. The court itself assumes that instructions on duties of that kind are still possible even during an incapacity for work, provided there is an urgent operational reason for them.
That duty applies only in exceptional cases, namely where imminent harm to the business would go unnoticed without the employee's information and could not be averted by other means. The difference from “urgent work” is considerable: it is about knowledge held by the employee who has fallen ill and by no one else, not about every open item on their desk.
Not sure whether a written warning after a sickness notification will hold?
Whether a contractual duty to give notice is valid depends on how it is worded and on whether the company does not already know about the open matters anyway.
If you have received a warning of this kind as an employee, or if you would like your contract templates reviewed as an employer, we offer you a short, free initial assessment. In that conversation we clarify how your situation should be assessed and which next steps make sense.
