Business trips must be paid when required by the company collective agreement. The Supreme Court recalled this in a ruling dated 15 October. The High Court ruled in favor of a sound engineer from Spanish Radio and Television (RTVE) who worked on the MasterChef program, and condemned the public body to pay him 982 euros in costs, plus legal interest.
The magistrates overturned a previous resolution of the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid and a well-established doctrine: employees have the right to be compensated when the company orders them to go to a center other than their usual place of work. In this case the worker had to go to the sets where the film was shot. reality culinary, located in Fuente el Saz del Jarama, about 45 kilometers from its traditional center in Prado del Rey.
According to the proven elements of the sentence (access its content here), the employee should have gone to the television program studios for two years. According to the RTVE collective agreement, employees who had to travel to another workplace “were entitled to subsistence allowance, transport costs and recognition of travel time as part of their working day”.
The origin of the conflict dates back to 2017, when a group of employees filed a class action lawsuit believing that RTVE had not respected the conditions set out in the agreement. Two years later, the courts agreed with them and recognized their right to receive a per diem and compensation for the trip. Since the judicial decision, the organization has begun to regularize the salaries of dismissed employees, paying per diems such as lunch, dinner and other expenses, but without including travel time to and from studies. The public company claimed in its defense that the remainder of the payments it would have been delayedbecause it was very complicated to calculate all the workers who participated in the filming.
Given this situation, one of the technicians involved filed a new lawsuit in 2019 which, after several years of legal proceedings, reached the Supreme Court.
By the deadline
RTVE found that the worker’s claim was time-barred, as the worker submitted the conciliation form more than a year after the 2019 collective ruling. The Superior Court of Justice of Madrid ruled in favor of the public body. However, the Supreme corrected this criterion and ascertained that the action is not time-barred, since the company has partially recognized the debt, which allows the legal deadline for the claim to be reopened. According to the magistrates, “the prescription of actions is interrupted by their exercise before the judicial authority, by an extrajudicial claim by the creditor and by any act of recognition of the debt by the debtor”.
Likewise, the ruling states that the company’s delay in calculating pending payments cannot turn against the workers. “The application of the institution of the extinctive prescription must be restrictive and not rigorous, so as to harm only those who, through their inertia, have renounced their rights”, reads the sentence, to prevent workers from losing the right to complain due to the company’s slowness in payments.
With this decision, the Supreme Court confirms the first sentence of the Social Court number 9 of Madrid, and condemns RTVE to pay the sum of 982 euros plus a 10% interest for late payment. Likewise, the company will also have to pay the costs of the appeal, set at 800 euros.
Beyond the amount, the case has a collective relevance, as it concerns all the staff employed in the filming of MasterChef and other programs recorded outside the usual RTVE structures. The Supreme Court emphasizes that the issue has “general impact”, which justifies the case reaching the High Court, despite it being a claim worth less than €3,000.
