Some employees sued their company for cutting the salary. The supreme has responded that being unpunctual is not a job

The working day is much more than a simple time convention. From the labor reform of 2021, in which the SCHEDULE HOURS REGISTRATION As a method to measure Time really workedhas become a factor that conditions the salary that the employee must receive. Both when working More hours of the agreedlike when it doesn’t meet them.

That is precisely what the Supreme Court had to remind them of the collective claim of a group of workers filed against their employer. If you do not meet your schedule and you are late, You will charge less.

What happened? As you can read in The Supreme Court Judgmenta group of workers, represented by their union links, said that, due to the distance between the system of day registration And the employee’s job, every day they were counted between one and three minutes of delay, which was added monthly.

The employees complained that, when doing the payrolls, the company discounted that time not worked on their salary, so they received less than agreed.

What do employees claim? Workers recognize that Importuality It is a reason for sanction contemplated in the collective agreement of the company, but does not apply to salary reduction for that reason. Instead, it should be done through other types of warnings or compensation since the agreement is governed by a certain amount of annual hours, not for daily days. In this way, the company could ask employees to compensate for that time at any other time of the year, avoiding salary cut.

Employees consider that, delays the delays of their salary, they would be imposing a double sanction and incurring a type of sanction called “Fine of having“, in which salary amounts are subtracted or sanctions on vacations or holidays are applied. A practice prohibited by article 58.3 of the Workers Statute.

What does the Supreme Court say? The sentence of the High Court bases its argument to give the reason to the company in article 26.1 of the Statute of the Workers in which it is specified: “The totality of the economic perceptions of the workers, in money or in kind, for the professional benefit of the labor services in an alienation, and the effective work, whatever the form of remuneration, or the computable rest periods as a computable rest periods,” will be considered salary.

The supreme considers that salary Back the work Cash or the computable rest time as work, while in article 30 of the Workers’ Statute it is established that “the worker will keep the right to his salary if he does not provide services for cause to the employer and not the worker.”

Therefore, “during the time when the worker does not provide labor services, having an obligation to do so, without any justification, the sinalagmatic character of the employment contract assumes that salary is not accrued, without this implying a fine of having.” That is, since the unpunctuality was not produced for any reason attributable to the company, and the time of delay is not considered effective working timethe company is in its right not to pay it, without being considered as a sanction.

Not that they don’t pay you, they can fire you. The Supreme Court specifies that the “fine of having” applies when it occurs in a salary cut or benefits to which the worker is entitled. However, in this case, “the worker has no right to receive said salary because he has not provided services for causes only to him,” the sentence abounds. In other words: the company does not have to pay for a job that the employee has not done and, therefore, cannot apply any penalty about something that does not correspond to it.

In addition, the Supreme Court rules out the assumption of the double sanction since it has been shown that it is something that employees have no right because they have not provided the service that justifies it, although it indicates that “a contractual breach that, if reiterated, justifies the exercise of disciplinary power by the employer.” That is, that the company is not obliged to pay for the time that has not been worked, but can impose disciplinary measures on employees (and even cause with dismissal) by repeated breach of your contract without just cause.

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Image | Flickr (Kris Arnold), Unspash (MUSEMIND UX AGENCY)