On September 23, 2026, the French Cour de cassation (Chambre sociale, Formation de section) delivered judgment No. 755 FS-B on pourvoi No. 25-13.914 (ECLI:FR:CCASS:2026:SO00755), published in the Bulletin. It quashed in full the January 31, 2025 judgment of the Lyon Court of Appeal that had ordered Adecco France to convene an extraordinary meeting of the establishment CSSCT (commission santé, sécurité et conditions de travail) on a defined agenda, and had awarded the CSE a provisional damages sum.
Articles L. 2315-27, paragraphs 1 and 2, and L. 2315-38 of the Code du travail are public-order rules. An employer must organise a CSSCT meeting when two CSE staff representatives make a motivated request covering health, safety or working conditions. The judge must still verify that the proposed agenda items actually fall within those attributions. Lyon refused that check. The file is remitted to the Grenoble Court of Appeal.
Does the employer still have to convene when two CSE members ask?
Yes, once three conditions are met: two CSE staff representatives make the request, it is motivated, and it concerns health, safety or working conditions. L. 2315-38 lets the CSE delegate all or part of its health, safety and working-conditions attributions to the CSSCT, except the appointment of an expert and the CSE's consultative votes.
The Court reads Adecco's February 27, 2019 agreement in line with that statute. Article 5.1.1.1 delegates those CSE-E attributions to the CSSCT-E, with the same two exceptions. Article 5.1.3.2 provides four CSSCT-E meetings a year and extra meetings at the request of the CSE-E chair or of two CSE-E staff representatives. Extra CSSCT-E meetings are therefore organised when two CSE-E staff representatives make a motivated request on those subjects. Opportunity is not a ground for refusal. Subject-matter is.
What did Lyon get wrong, and what must Grenoble now check?
Two members of the Adecco Ouest establishment CSE asked, on June 9, 2023, for an extraordinary CSSCT meeting with a defined agenda. The company refused. On July 12, 2023 the CSE seized the référé judge, seeking an order to convene and a provisional damages sum. Lyon held that the employer could not assess the opportunity of the request, nor even the relevance of the agenda items, treated a non-joint agenda as regular, and found a manifestly illicit disturbance (trouble manifestement illicite).
Cassation says that skipped the statutory filter. The appeal court had to verify whether the points the two CSE members wanted on the CSSCT-E agenda related to health, safety or working conditions. Grenoble must now do that item by item. The company's third cassation ground, the one the Court ruled on, was that the CSE members were using the extra-meeting route to bypass the CSSCT chair's refusal to put out-of-remit questions on an ordinary agenda. That argument is back in play. The Court did not decide the other grounds.
Who is exposed, and what changes in the meeting process this week?
Every French employer with a CSE that has a CSSCT: mandatory in companies and distinct establishments of 300 or more employees, and wherever a collective agreement creates one below that threshold. Staffing groups and multi-establishment employers (Adecco is the facts, not a carve-out) cannot treat a two-member request as an automatic all-topics summons, nor as a letter they may ignore. A blanket refusal remains a référé risk if the items are in remit. A blanket acceptance is equally unsafe if they are not.
Log every CSSCT extra-meeting request with the two names, the motivation, and a line-by-line mapping of agenda items to health, safety and working-conditions attributions. Refuse in writing only the items that sit outside those attributions. Convene on the items that do. Keep the CSE's consultative votes and expert appointments on the CSE, not the CSSCT, which is the L. 2315-38 exception.
| Filter | Lyon CA (January 31, 2025, quashed) | Cassation (September 23, 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Two CSE members, motivated request | Employer must convene; no review of agenda relevance | Employer must convene if the items are health, safety or working conditions |
| Agenda items outside CSSCT attributions | Still to be convened | The judge must verify; items outside remit fail |
| Collective-agreement extra-meeting clause | Read as an open-agenda right | Interpreted in line with L. 2315-27 |
| Référé outcome | Order to convene plus provisional damages | Quashed; remitted to Grenoble CA |
What should employers and CSE secretariats do before the next request?
Map the CSSCT's delegated attributions against the CSE's remaining consultative and expert powers. Update standing orders, and any 2017 IRP agreement that copies Adecco's two-representative extra-meeting clause, so the clause recites the health, safety and working-conditions filter. Brief the CSSCT chair (usually the employer) and the CSE secretary that a two-member letter is neither a blank cheque nor a request they can sit on. Watch the Grenoble remand for how appeal courts now score individual agenda points. Continuous, per-jurisdiction real-time monitoring surfaces this kind of Bulletin holding the moment the Court publishes it.
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Verify whether your CSSCT extra-meeting playbook treats a two-member request as automatic or as filtered. Re-read pending requests against L. 2315-27 and L. 2315-38, item by item. Brief HR, the CSSCT chair and outside labour counsel before the next motivated letter lands. Obsidian tracks French employee-representation rulings against the Code du travail so this file does not wait for the next Bulletin to land on a desk.
