Your Employer Signed a Contract: You Probably Didn't Read It Either

By Harvey Specter Jr. — Law, Business & Power Correspondent

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Article 36 of Malta's Employment and Industrial Relations Act. Most employees have heard of it the way people have heard of the Mona Lisa — by name, with vague reverence, and no idea what's actually in it. That's not an accident. The contract your employer hands you on day one is a document drafted by their lawyers, reviewed by their HR team, and handed to you with a pen and a smile and the quiet assumption that you won't read the footnotes.

You didn't. Nobody does. That's the game.

Here is what Article 36 actually requires: your employer must give you, in writing, the essential terms of your employment within eight days of you starting work. Not a summary. Not a welcome email. The terms — working hours, probation period, notice periods, entitlement to leave, the applicable collective agreement if one exists, and the place of work. The law is specific because specificity is power, and the people who drafted that law understood which side of the table needed protecting.

The part they don't tell you is what happens when the contract says something and the law says something different. Under Maltese employment law, you cannot contract out of your statutory minimum rights. The contract cannot legally give you less than the law guarantees. If your employer writes "12 days annual leave" into your contract and the applicable law or wage regulation order gives you more, the contract provision is void. Not voidable — void. It has no legal effect. The paper exists. The clause does not.

I came to this not in a lecture hall but in a corridor outside a courtroom, helping someone whose employer had written a notice period into a contract that bore no relationship to what the law required. The employer knew. The employee didn't. That asymmetry of information is the entire business model of the badly drafted employment contract, and it works because most people never find out until they're already in the fight.

The probation clause is where I see the most abuse, and it is worth being specific. Under Maltese law, the maximum probation period for most employees is one year, reduced to six months for technical or supervisory roles, and to one month for part-time workers employed for under seven hours per week. Beyond those limits, the clause is unenforceable — but employers write it anyway, because the employee who believes the clause is valid behaves differently from the one who knows it isn't. That belief is worth something to the employer. It costs the employee everything.

Notice periods work the same way. The law sets minimums on a sliding scale tied to length of service — from one week after a month of continuous employment up to eight weeks after four or more years. Your contract may say something different. If it says more, fine — you negotiated better. If it says less, the statutory minimum applies and what's written on that paper is decoration. The trap is when an employer uses a contract that says less to pressure an employee into leaving without proper notice pay. Most people comply. They don't know they don't have to.

The EU layer matters here too. The Transparent and Predictable Working Conditions Directive — Directive (EU) 2019/1152 — which Malta transposed into law by 2022, added teeth to Article 36's framework. Employers must now notify employees of any changes to their terms before those changes take effect, not after. A quiet shift in your rota, a reclassification of your role, a change in your place of work — these require written notice. They are not administrative adjustments your employer can make unilaterally. They are changes to a contract that requires your knowledge and, depending on the nature of the change, your agreement.

The practical implication is this: every time your employer changes something about how you work and doesn't tell you in writing first, they are in breach of their transposition obligations under EU law. The breach may be small. But documented small breaches have a way of becoming very useful leverage in larger disputes.

The move I keep coming back to is this: before any negotiation with your employer — before a disciplinary hearing, before a redundancy discussion, before you're told your role is being restructured — you are legally entitled to request a complete written statement of your current terms. Make that request in writing. Keep a copy. The response, and the timing of the response, will tell you more about your employer's legal position than anything their HR team says in the room.

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Your move tomorrow: Pull out your employment contract