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Families that employ domestic workers must now keep a record of their working hours. Europe has ruled against the Spanish regulation that exempts households from the time control required of all companies and self-employed workers, which will be further tightened when the reduction of the working day is approved, which will make it compulsory to do so in digital form so that it cannot be manipulated and so that it can be accessed remotely by labour inspectors.
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on Thursday issued a judgment ruling that domestic workers must also establish a system for calculating their daily working hours. The Luxembourg-based court warns that otherwise "those employees are thus deprived of the possibility of determining objectively and reliably the number of hours of work performed and their distribution over time" in the event that they are dismissed.
The European court has ruled in this way after receiving a question from the high court of justice of the Basque Country on the case of a full-time domestic worker who challenged her dismissal in the Spanish courts and demanded more than 7,183 euros for excess working hours and holidays not taken. She claimed that she had worked "up to 79 hours per week". The court declared the dismissal unfair and imposed a compensation of 1,299.28 euros, but did not recognise the overtime claimed "as neither the reality of the working day nor the salary claimed was proven". The judgement states, "The evidence provided by the plaintiff is totally insufficient and that the plaintiff's claims cannot be concluded to be proven simply by the failure to provide the time records, and therefore calls for this to be corrected."
The CJEU also recalled in its ruling on Thursday that in a 2019 judgment it had already declared illegal the Spanish legislation then in force and its interpretation by the national judicial bodies, according to which employers were not obliged to establish a system to record the daily working hours of each employee.
This ruling comes precisely at a time when the government is finalising a new law that will reduce the working day to 37.5 hours and tighten up the time register, so that it will be digital and accessible at any time by tax inspectors. But this new text does not establish the obligation for families to also keep this time register of their domestic workers, something they will have to incorporate if they want to comply with European law.
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