Female employee awarded €9,000 after court finds gender-based discrimination
A woman from Lanzarote has been awarded almost €9,000 after the Canary Islands High Court ruled that she was indirectly discriminated against because of her gender when applying for unemployment benefits.
The ruling, issued by the Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Canarias, orders Spain’s Public Employment Service, the Servicio Público de Empleo Estatal (SEPE), to pay €8,937 in back payments after wrongly denying her access to a higher unemployment subsidy.
The case centres on the benefits available to people aged over 52. Although the woman met the age requirement, SEPE refused her the more generous subsidy because she had worked under part-time contracts. Instead, she was paid a lower rate of €5.64 per day.
The court found that this decision was unfair and discriminatory. Judges ruled that she should have received the higher daily amount of €15.44 and ordered SEPE to pay the difference for the period between March 2019 and December 2021.
The High Court overturned an earlier decision by a court in Arrecife that had sided with SEPE. In its judgment, the court said the rules used to assess the woman’s contribution record treated part-time workers unfairly by counting their working days as less than full days.
According to the judges, this approach particularly affects women, who are far more likely to be employed part-time. For that reason, the court concluded that the case amounted to indirect discrimination on the grounds of sex.
The ruling applies European case law for the first time in Spain in a case involving a woman. The judges referred to decisions by the Court of Justice of the European Union and Spain’s Constitutional Court, which state that every day worked must count equally for social security purposes, regardless of whether the job is full-time or part-time.
By applying this gender-equality principle, the court ruled that the woman should have been granted the more favourable unemployment benefit from the outset.
This decision is seen as a major legal milestone, and could have wider consequences for other part-time workers, particularly women, who may have been affected by similar benefit calculations across the Canary Islands and the rest of Spain.
Share:
