Dismissal during a probationary period: Your rights and options

Questioner

Good evening, I have a question about dismissal during the probationary period that is in some sense due to negligence on the part of the employer. I started a traineeship for website development at a training/secondment agency together with 11 others at the beginning of August. Part of this traineeship is a mandatory training with a length of 8 weeks (Aug-Sep). Immediately after this you will be employed by this agency for a period of 18 months (or 1.5 years). During this period, the real traineeship, you will be seconded to at least one external client to gain practical experience. Before the start of the training, I signed 2 agreements: a training agreement for the 8 training weeks and an employment contract for the 18 traineeship months, whereby the first agreement forms an integral part of the latter. As it happens, the agency was unable to arrange placements for every trainee in time and therefore today, on day 3 of the traineeship, dismissed 6 of the 12 trainees, including me. It proved very difficult to convince potential clients of our technical expertise, and many of them have therefore not yet shown any concrete interest. Because the agency cannot advance all salary costs for a long period during this uncertain period, our employment contract was therefore terminated today within the statutory probationary period of 1 month. However, I am not comfortable with it, because I know that the agency only started looking for potential clients/arranging job interviews for no less than 12 trainees from week 5 of the training phase. This is simply a time-consuming job, so in my opinion they should have started much earlier. Before the training started, the agency already knew what each trainee could already do and what he/she would be taught during the training. So the agency could have actually already set out the lines with various clients before the start of the training to sell the concept, and after a few weeks they could have come back with trainees to show their progress. Unfortunately, the employment contract does not mention anything about a job guarantee during the traineeship, but we as trainees are still the victims of their poor time management (negligence of the employer). My question is to what extent I and my fellow trainees who were also dismissed during the probationary period can take legal action on this. We were not able to officially do a trial run (day 1 and 2 of the traineeship were days off because they could not find us anywhere yet), but the agency is very satisfied with the performance we delivered during the training phase. I am very curious! Thanks in advance for your response.

Lawyer

I can only advise you properly based on the content of all agreements, other arrangements, and correspondence. If desired, you can contact me directly - jointly.