Internal workplace regulations: what they should say, and what they shouldn't

It is one of the documents most cited in court, and one of the least considered when it is drafted.

Internal workplace regulations are the set of provisions binding on workers and employers in the course of a company's activity. They are drawn up by a joint committee and filed with the labour authority. That much is widely known.

What usually fails is the content. Regulations copied from a template describe a company that does not exist: schedules nobody keeps, procedures never followed, departments the company does not have. In litigation that is not neutral. Regulations that do not match the reality of the operation weaken the employer who invokes them, because the other side need only show the distance between the paper and the fact.

It should state, precisely, what the company actually does: real start and finish times, place and moment of payment, days and hours for cleaning, health and safety rules applicable to that specific activity, and the disciplinary procedure with its deadlines.

It should not contain penalties the law does not allow, nor waivers of rights, nor clauses restricting access to labour justice. Any of those three is not merely inoperative: it costs the rest of the document its credibility.

Nor are the regulations the place for the compliance policy, the code of ethics or the anti-discrimination protocol. Those should exist, be communicated and be referenced by the regulations — but merging them into a single document makes the whole harder to update and easier to challenge.