Can COVID-19 be considered a stigmatized illness for characterization of a dismissal in Spain?

The court judgments that have ruled so far on the characterization of dismissals due to reasons related to COVID-19 -of which a few were described in our October 1, 2020 post-, have done so by interpreting the “dismissal ban” contained in article 2 of Royal Decree-Law 9/2020, which has been extended to remain in effect […]

read more

Can a company punish a worker using images from another employee’s mobile phone as evidence?

The Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) concluded in a decision that punishing one employee on the basis of images captured with a mobile phone of another employee breaches data protection legislation. Companies must be extremely careful about how they obtain proof to take action against employees on disciplinary grounds. In its decision, the AEPD addressed […]

read more

Smoking three packs of cigarettes a day does not prevent a heart attack from being considered as a work-related accident

Supreme Court case law assumes that cardiovascular damage is a work-related accident, due to the fact that stress from work often triggers or contributes to cardiovascular disease.   The Supreme Court has ruled the death of a security guard that suffered a sudden heart attack at work and during working hours as a work-related accident, […]

read more

Limits on workplace dress code policies

Limits on workplace dress code policies Last August we posted an article on how a male worker in the UK decided to turn up for work in a dress, after previously having been reprimanded by the company for turning up in shorts, in mid-summer, and sent home to change. In that article, we reasoned that […]

read more

The supreme court rules that dismissals qualify as a collective layoff (redundancy) where they exceed the legal thresholds at an establishment with more than 20 workers

The Supreme Court has ruled, in a judgment delivered on October 17, 2016, that for the purposes of determining the existence of a collective layoff, the reference unit must be the company, if the thresholds established in article 51.1 of the Workers’ Statute are exceeded at the company as a whole, and establishments that normally […]

read more