The Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) has ruled this Thursday that domestic employers are obliged to establish a system that allows recording the daily working hours of domestic workers, in order to guarantee a count of hours worked so that they can claim their rights in the event of dismissal, reports the Europa Press agency.
The CJEU has thus ruled on the case of a full-time domestic worker who challenged her dismissal before the Spanish courts, which was declared inadmissible, so her employers had to pay her the amounts corresponding to the vacation days not already enjoyed. you pay them extra.
The Spanish judge considered that the worker had not proven either the hours worked or the salary she was claiming and considered that her request could not be accepted solely due to the lack of contribution from her employers of the time records and hours worked, since Spanish regulations exempts certain special jobs from this measure, including domestic workers. However, the court consulted European justice about the legality of this exclusion, within community regulations.
The CJEU recalls that in a 2019 ruling it already declared illegal the Spanish regulations then in force and the interpretation of this by the national courts, according to which employers were not obliged to establish a system that would allow computing the daily working hours carried out by each worker. Just a few days before, the first Government of Pedro Sánchez, with Minister Magdalena Valerio as head of the Ministry of Labor, approved mandatory time registration.
Total exclusion is not possible, but there may be “exceptions”
The Court of Justice has pointed out that a law that excludes domestic workers from a system that allows their daily working hours to be computed, “and that therefore deprives” these employees of the possibility of “objectively and reliably determining the number of working hours performed and their distribution over time”, “manifestly violates the provisions of the European” Directive.
However, the magistrates recognize that there may be “exceptions” given the particularities of domestic employment. “Due to the particularities of the domestic work sector, a system that requires employers to compute the daily working hours of each domestic worker may provide for exceptions with respect to overtime and part-time work, provided that such exceptions do not deprive the regulations in question of their content”, an issue that will be up to the Spanish court that has submitted the query to the CJEU to verify, the ruling states.
Furthermore, the ruling insists that, given that domestic work is a clearly feminized sector, it asks that possible cases of indirect discrimination based on sex be taken into account, unless this situation of exclusion is objectively justified, something that also corresponds to justice. national evaluate.
#European #justice #requires #domestic #workers #record #working #hours
