The legal concept of the comparable employee appears in various labor law statutes and serves entirely different functions in some cases. The comparable employee is particularly relevant in the context of social selection during layoffs for operational reasons. Although it ultimately concerns the same legal concept, the comparable employee is defined somewhat differently by jurisprudence and literature in the various laws. Complicating matters, different terms are sometimes used for the same criteria of distinction. Therefore, the first part of the paper will outline the various criteria for determining the comparable employee in different labor law statutes, with a focus on the comparable employee in the context of social selection. In the second part of the paper, the results will be compared against each other.