Have a main company that does stuff, which hires subcontractor subsidiaries. They have one employee each.
Then, when she took maternal leave, you could just have liquidated the subcontractor - problem solved.
> You can't just claim that the people that are effectively your employees are simply contractors.
No, they are the employees of my subsidiary. They are entitled to all of the protections of labour law, including all the maternity leave and all that. If the subsidiary goes out of business, too bad. That's what they're for.
Calling for us to point to a certain paragraph of a certain law is not really fair, because we're generally not lawyers here. Can you instead explain why all companies are not structured the way you suggest. Because all managers are idiots, or because they've realized that it's not legally sound?
In America, people have a long and proud tradition of coming up with Byzantine workarounds for laws. In Europe, not so much.
I can't prove a negative, but you can prove a positive.
The company hiring the subcontractor would run a high risk of being classified as the employer despite the intermediate company.