Termination of Employment Contract on Employee\'s Initiative

Termination of an employment contract on the initiative of an employee is one of the most common reasons of firing employees. A lot of employers mistakenly believe that termination of an employment contract on the initiative of an employee is the easiest way to end employment relationships. Nevertheless, case law contains quite a large number of disputes arising from seemingly simple procedure of employee’s dismissal at his own initiative. A comprehensive study on the features of the legal framework that regulates termination of employment contracts on the initiative of the employee in the Russian labor law was carried for this qualifying paper. This allowed to develop recommendations for the elimination of inefficient norms and gaps in labor legislation, as well as to identify problematic issues of law enforcement and give practical recommendations to the employee and the employer to avoid possible recognition of dismissal unlawful. In particular, it was proposed to introduce into the art. 80 of Labour Code of the Russian Federation certain requirements to the contents of the letter of resignation, to expand the list of valid reasons for the dismissal at own initiative, as well as a number of other changes. In addition, proposals were made for the development of electronic personnel records management. For instance, paper proposes provisions to be included in the Labour Code, that would allow employees to submit a self-initiated dismissal application in the form of an electronic document.