A employment contract is an agreement by which a person (the employee) undertakes to make his/her activities available to another person (the employer), with whom he/she enters into a subordinate relationship, in return for remuneration.
There are two types of employment contracts, i.e. employment contracts of indeterminate duration (contrat de travail à durée indéterminée - CDI) and fixed-term employment contracts (contrat de travail à durée déterminée - CDD).
A CDI contract is an employment contract that has no set end date, this is the common law employment contract. It can be broken at any time by unilateral will by either party, provided that, when the break originates from the employer, a real and serious cause for the break exists, and a dismissal procedure is followed.
A CDD can only be concluded according to cases which are exhaustively listed by the law. This is the exception compared to a CDI contract.
A CDI or CDD contract must be provided in writing for each employee individually, at the latest by the time the employee joins the company.