The Supreme Court established in a judgment that the company’s working day records must collect sufficient data, such as the identity or place of work of the employee, for the works council to be able to carry out its work effectively. control and detect abuse or non-compliance in detail. The social judges declare final the judgment of the National Court which, in the case of BBVA, confirmed that this information was part of the working day record and removed the requirement that overtime be subsequently authorized by a superior, although the latter this aspect was neither the bank nor the unions appealed to the Supreme Court.
The trial began before the National Court when the CGT union denounced the fact that the bank’s system of recording working hours did not comply with the Banking Agreement, the agreements and even the Workers’ Statute. They requested that the information contained in the register of working days be traceable, that it also reflect non-effective work breaks, that overtime not be subject to subsequent authorization by a superior and, finally, that the register includes data such as the identity and location of the worker. the employee’s work.
The CGT union denounced that the recording of working time prevented, in practice, BBVA workers from requesting authorization to work overtime. In November 2021 alone, according to the lawsuit, bank employees worked 263,000 hours of overtime and only 1.65% was requested to be calculated. “It is neither objective nor reliable,” denounced the union, and the fact of not having access to workers’ data makes it impossible to detect abuse or irregularities.
The National Court, in a judgment now upheld by the Supreme Court, granted two of the union’s requests. On the one hand, this forced BBVA to remove the requirement that overtime, to be considered as such, had to be approved ex post by a superior. This, according to the judges, reduced the “credibility” of the day’s record. This first judgment also required the bank to record data such as the identity, province and population of each worker. Failure to provide this data to the works council, the National Court said, limited the “monitoring and control functions” of worker representation.
The case went to the Supreme Court after the union and BBVA appealed. The bank did not question the part of the judgment which prohibited the subsequent submission of the authorization of overtime by a superior, but it questioned the obligation to provide the works council with data such as the first and last name of each worker entered in the register. The judges, in the judgment to which elDiario.es had access, explain that the inclusion of this data does not violate data protection regulations and also recall the duty of the committee not to use them for purposes other than control of employees’ working hours.
“Complies with the criteria for the transfer of relevant personal data, minimum proportionate and necessary for the fulfillment of the legal function of legal representation of workers, in its mission of monitoring and controlling health and safety conditions at work,” explains the Supreme Court. . The bank had opposed this until now, alleging that providing this information violated regulations and violated workers’ privacy. The Court also rejects the entity’s attempt to alter the proven facts about how it controls its workers’ excess hours.
The judges also rejected the appeal in which the union asked the Supreme Court to go further than the National Court and require the bank to provide “traceable” information. For the Supreme Court, the bank’s working hours recording system “meets the required requirements of traceability, objectivity and reliability”. In contact with elDiario.es, BBVA limited itself to emphasizing that “the bank is analyzing the content and scope of the Supreme Court’s resolution” but that in any case “it will comply with the decisions of the courts in this matter.
The National Court recalled in this case that over the last five years, it has rendered half a dozen decisions which considered that it was legal, for example, that coffee or cigarette breaks were not considered to be actual working time, that companies had to authorize overtime or that a work record will not be reliable if it is limited to the worker signing a sheet when entering and leaving the office.
