The termination of a worker’s contract due to completion of a project (apart from the fact this kind of contract has recently been eliminated) should not imply a problem; however very often this can become a real headache.

It is becoming more and more common that the personal aspects of somebody whose contract is terminated or such person’s manoeuvres aimed at making the termination difficult result in a favourable view by the courts and the case ends up with a judgement ruling that the contractual termination is null and void. Therefore, you should be aware of the kind of problems this disastrous and unexpected outcome could entail in order to adopt the appropriate decisions.

This is the case of information about the intention of an employee who finds out that his/her contract will be terminated, just after announcing he/she would be getting married and was going to request the relevant leave of absence. This situation recently resulted in the judgement that we discuss here and could be a good example of the precautions that must be taken into consideration in certain cases. 

In this respect, we refer to judgement number 130/2022 of 9 February 2022 ruled by the Labour Chamber of the Supreme Court, which analyses a case that is curious, to say the least, but one that seems we will come across more and more often.

What happened in this specific case?

The worker, who would later become the plaintiff, had been working in the company since 2018 by virtue of a temporary contract for a specific project or service, mainly being assigned to a project that was planned to be completed in February 2022.

A year and a half ago, in June 2019, the worker informed the company that she was planning to get married in August 2019 and would request the applicable 15 days for leave of absence due to her wedding taking place immediately afterwards.

However, unexpectedly, a few days after providing this information, the company informed her of the termination of her contract due to the project being completed. Of course, afterwards the company recruited another worker a few days later, with the same job category as the dismissed worker, to perform the duties she had been responsible for and should have performed until February 2022.

What was the court’s judgement?

The Supreme Court upheld the previous judgement ruled by the High Court of Justice of Galicia that found in favour of the plaintiff by ruling the dismissal was null and void as well as ordering the company to pay her compensation of €15,000 due to having violated her fundamental rights.

The Chamber pointed out that adopting a negative decision against a worker due to her marriage is to inflict discriminatory treatment that infringes Article 14 of the Spanish Constitution but placed no importance on the fact that the aforementioned article does not refer to marital status being one of the situations against which discriminatory treatment is forbidden because it deemed that, although it does not include it neither does it exclude it.

After reading the proven facts in the judgement summarised above, the truth is that the court’s decision is not unusual, even more so considering the constant trickle of court judgements that have been ruled sanctioning companies’ decisions as being null and void if they could in any way be related to the workers’ personal circumstances, above all those that have a certain connection with a healthy work-life balance, based on the fact that this could lead to possible “discrimination” (discrimination due to marital status, discrimination by association, etc.).

The most remarkable aspect about this case is that the judgement did not even discuss whether or not there was a reason for the dismissal, directly admitting that it was a result of the plaintiff’s marriage (something that, as mentioned, was very obvious) and that the Chamber analysed the company’s decision in spite of acknowledging the right to marriage is not a fundamental right, from the “perspective of gender” as a basic argument to draw the conclusion that the dismissal must be categorised as null and void.

Must we study the personal sphere of all the workers before a company adopts any decision to avoid an unexpected risk and therefore a higher cost?

After reading this judgement, several questions can be raised: will Article 14 of the Spanish Constitution begin to be interpreted as a way of guaranteeing absolute equality of treatment? Will companies need to know all the circumstances in workers’ personal sphere to exclude any possible differentiating factor?

Historically, the differentiating factors protected in Article 14 (which led to the dismissal being ruled null and void) have been circumstances linked to forms of oppression or segregation of certain groups of people. However, more and more, the Spanish courts make the nullity a far too common consequence of any company decision that could be connected to a worker’s personal circumstances, above all those that are related to the obligation to guarantee the legal, economic and social protection of the family.

Apparent discrimination versus the real reason for the company’s decision

Apart from the foregoing, it should be recalled that any analysis of possible discrimination must be conducted based on the reason for the grounds of the decision and to what extent this reason is really justified and not related to an apparent discriminatory motive.

Regarding this specific case, we wonder whether the court’s judgement would have been different if this marriage had been announced in January or February 2022, in other words, when the termination of the contract was planned. Very likely, in this case, instead of apparent discrimination, an objection would have been raised against the natural date for the termination of the contract … and the situation would have been different.

This draws our attention to the importance of any decision adopted by a company being supported by a legal motive or reason. In these cases, although the court could have considered it was insufficient to justify the decision, it could have ruled out apparent discrimination and thus the termination being ruled null and void could have been avoided.

Once again, this is a good reason to draw your attention to the need to obtain sufficient preventive advice and thus avoid a lot of headaches.