What can you do in 100 minutes?
You can travel from Paris to Lyon by TGV, watch Toy Story 4, or listen to (almost) the entirety of The Beatles’ White Album. Or, like us today, you can celebrate the 100th issue of “Hello Monday”
For 100 issues, we have been observing the world of work one minute at a time, and a few constants have emerged.
Since 100 is quite a long list, we suggest reviewing 10 guiding principles of employment law:
1. Employment law: a revealer, not a follower
It is often called slow or overly technical. That is a misreading. Employment law is the precise spot where the real tensions of work surface: power, time, health, and the collective. It doesn’t chase after work; it reveals its underlying structure.
2. Prevention: the core of your responsibility
It is not merely an “extra compliance layer.” When neglected, prevention always returns to center stage, but in a less pleasant way: costlier, more conflictual, and more exposed. In employment law, what you fail to anticipate rarely reminds you of its presence gently.
3. Reality on the ground: substance over form
Independence, annualized hours, flexibility… Stated statuses have their uses, but employment law consistently tests them against the actual conditions of execution. It pits factual reality against corporate rhetoric.
4. Agility: the requirement of a legal framework
Hybrid work and autonomy are not problems in themselves. They become problems when they replace clarity. In employment law, agility without a framework is rarely a sustainable advancement.
5. Management: a legal fact in its own right
Management is not just a matter of “corporate culture” or interpersonal skills. The moment it impacts health, workload, or dignity, it fully enters the judicial arena. To manage is to engage the company’s liability.
6. Working hours: the mirror of organization
It is never just a matter of schedules. It is a question of workload, rest, and boundaries. Behind the time tracking always lies your organizational model.
7. The work/life boundary: a major friction zone
This boundary is no longer theoretical. It has become a major friction zone: digital, reputational, and disciplinary. Today, employment law arbitrates this increasingly fragile contact zone.
8. The workplace collective: shifted rather than vanished
We would be wrong to believe that individualization has swept everything away. Working conditions, workload, representation, coordination, expression, recognition: the collective returns everywhere we thought we could think solely in terms of individual trajectories.
9. Evidence: the architecture of your defense
What is not tracked, objectified, documented, or investigated quickly becomes fragile. The best legal reasoning holds up poorly without supporting evidence. Employment law is a living law; it is also a law of demonstration.
10. A law of balance: a strategy rather than an impediment
Employment law is not there to slow businesses down. Its function is to manage vital trade-offs: between performance and health, between subordination and dignity, between flexibility and security. This is precisely what makes it strategic and central.
100 issues later, our conviction remains intact:
employment law, the whole employment law, and nothing but employment law.
