Proceedings fees for dismissal

According to a recent ruling handed down by the Labour Division of our Supreme Court, it has been established that in the case of a possible clarification of the ruling, or even a mere request for it, provided that it is accredited that it has not been carried out in fraud of the Law, the wages for processing are accrued until the notification of the order. If you have any doubts, you can consult our Employment Lawyers.

Procedural wages are a supplementary compensation that compensates the worker for the loss of earnings suffered by the unfairly dismissed worker until he or she is reinstated, and are therefore only suspended or reduced when the worker has found another job or begins to receive unemployment benefits. However, in order to avoid an excessive lengthening in cases of insolvency or disappearance of the employer, the legislator has set as the final date for the collection of these processing wages not that of the actual reinstatement or compensation but that of the notification of the judgement. That legal determination was not intended to distinguish between notification of the judgment and notification of the order clarifying the judgment which, strictly speaking, must form an inseparable part of it to all intents and purposes. Therefore, in the specific case, where a clarifying order was issued to include a worker who was omitted when the claim was upheld, the accrual does not stop until the notification of that order, with which the judgement forms an inseparable whole.

As stated above, according to a recent judgment of 6 April 2016, in a literal interpretation, in general and without giving the option of any exception, it could be stated that the clarification of a judgment "cannot give rise to an extension of the wages for processing".

However, from the systematic interpretation of the legal value of the order for clarification, the Court holds that it is merely an extension of the judgment itself, the correction of an omission or a defect of expression or a material error, and therefore forms an indissoluble unit with the judgment it clarifies, which cannot be considered, strictly speaking, to have been correctly issued until the said clarification has been satisfied. The general rule must therefore be precisely that contained in the judgment under appeal, which is upheld: the wages for processing must be extended until the notification of the order clarifying the judgment. And this can occur even if the clarification is refused, provided that it has not been demanded with dilatory intent, i.e. that there is no procedural fraud, which would constitute a justified exception, among other possible exceptions, to the aforementioned general rule.

Indeed, in this case, there are no grounds for an exception to the above-mentioned general rule that the wages for the processing of the proceedings are extended until the notification of the order clarifying the judgment.