Many small and middle-sized companies have gaps in complying with legislation. In majority of the cases the reason is unawareness but sometimes the owner knows the legal requirements and does not meet them. The employees are becoming more and more aware about their legal rights. The legislation is created to establish order and everybody to benefit from his labor. And when someone decides to screw the rest participants from the chain, the chaos begins. Usually the employees are concerned about their labor and if the employeer does not meet or circumvents the labor legal requirements, the employee seeks ways for compensations. The first symptom is negligence to fulfill tasks or orders. The employee selects which task to fulfill and which to leave as well as the performance rate. When one employee is dissatisfied about his salary or attitude or terminated vacation, he starts to deliver lower quality. Not because he is uncapable, it’s just to harm his employeer. Usually the workers from supply chain are the people who impede the working process – by illness leaves, late coming to work, doing nothing, sabotage (deliberately harming the production) and so on. The number of employees in production and warehouse is the minimal possible to run the job and the company cannot afford to duplicate this number in order to cover regular absences. Respectively either the job is not done or there is overtime. In both cases the company loses.

Breaking the laws puts the firms in a volnurable situation as the employees have the option to attack the employeer. Some of these options are:

1. Signal to a state authority.

When submitting a complaint the employee knows where the problem is and directs the control authorities. In fact, in small towns, the company owners are “friends” with the state authorities and sanctions are not applied, just prescriptions are given. Anyway, the time spent in explanation during the authority check is lost time. The manager’s team live in constant fear from the next check and spends energy in ineffective actions in stead of applying the laws and control the processes.

2. Negligence to fulfill a task.

This is the most spread way for demonstration of dissatisfaction. The employee pretends that he has not understood the task and postpones its fulfilment or he is doing the task partially without finishing it. If the owners are too imperious and hold full control over everything and everybody, the workers start to hear only what they want to hear. By doing this, the employee spends more time with his boss for more clarifications and attention. This is a hidden way to contest the manager’s authority. Another reason for avoiding task fulfilment is when one employee wants to block the work of another employee. The owner cannot apply any sanction because the harming employee has a trump against the firm, e.g. breaking the laws. The work stops and again the company is the losing party.

3. Sabotage.

Every sabotage is a very unpleasant and rather expensive action. The company loses from withdrawing the product from the market, or broken machine or accident. The worker sabotages the product in order to attract the interest of state authorities who to come and sanction the employeer. This is a rather strong action which almost every time ends with employeer’s lose of money and image.

4. Information leak.

There is no need to hire detectives or economic spies in Bulgaria. It is enough one company to pay to a dissatisfied employee from a competitor. From thereon, nothing can stop the information leakage, especialy if this employee still works for the compatitor. Everything can be give out – recepies, technologies, plan for future campaigns, prices, certificates and so on. No need to explain what harm can be done.

There are of course many more examples for punishing the employeer for breaking the laws. Then the penalties come from the employees first and later from the state authorities. To avoid the above mentioned extremities in workers’ behaviour we’d better stick to the law (starting from the labor regulations) and then applying all legal acts related to accouting and operational work.

The simpliest way to achive this is by following these steps:

1. Every employee to have a labor contract and every temporary worker to have at least а temporary labor contract.

2. Every employee to sign that he is aware of the company internal rules.

3. Every employee to sign a confidentiality declaration.

4. The salaries and vacations to be clearly set. Avoid verbal agreements, especialy about payment. Everything should be on paper, official and signed.

5. Every employee should know about the individual and group liability he is bearing in case of any damage caused to the company.

6. Do regular instructions about the internal rules, procedures and every change in legislation related to your business.

The company owner should control that all his employees comply with the legislation and should not accept any precedents or diviations. The owner himself and his close entourage should be an example for complying with the laws without any compromise. This is the only way to legaly avoid a lot of harms to the company finances and image. And only in this way there will be a constant flow of employees willing to work for the firm.