The Polish national social insurance authority has no power to police ‘social dumping’. Neither is there any legal basis or justification for excluding workers performing work in other EU Member States from the national social insurance system based on an unverifiable assumption that social dumping is taking place.

The Spanish Supreme Court has again ruled on the highly controversial question of whether limitations to the liability of a transferee established in a collective bargaining agreement (‘CBA’) in the context of a CBA-led transfer are valid, or whether they contravene the Spanish implementation of the Acquired Rights Directive.

Giving an employee an official warning after he participated in a large pre-announced Labour Day demonstration is found to be in breach of the right to freedom of association.

The Irish Court of Appeal recently clarified the obligations of employers towards employees with a disability.
The judgment suggests that an employer is not required to alter the duties of a position held by an employee with a disability in order to accommodate that employee’s return to work if the duties, which the employee is no longer capable of performing, are considered essential to the employee’s position.

Recently, the Court of Amsterdam decided to ask preliminary questions to the ECJ about EU citizens’ rights of British nationals, anticipating Brexit. However, two weeks later, it allowed an appeal against this decision. It is therefore unclear if and when these questions will be asked.

The Labour Court of Brussels ordered an employer to pay a protection indemnity to an employee following termination on the basis of reorganisation during her pregnancy because (i) the employee benefited from a specific protection against dismissal and (ii) the employer failed to prove that the dismissal of the employee was based on reasons unrelated to the pregnancy.

Not granting compensation to fixed-term workers at the end of employment is not discriminatory as the end of the contract is foreseeable from the start, whereas the main objective of compensation for objective reasons, which generally applies to permanent workers, is to recompense them for the fact that termination of the contract is not knowable in advance.

A salary scale the ECJ had found discriminatory and said should be changed, was not discriminatory after the change.

It is ultimately for the courts to verify whether religious organisations can legitimately invoke occupational requirements as a reason for unequal treatment.

The Finnish Labour Court recently decided a case about the transfer of a business and the associated obligation to harmonise employees’ salaries. The Court held that the employer had not shown good reasons for continuing to pay different salaries to employees with equivalent responsibilities long after the transfer.

The abuse of successive fixed-term contracts in the public sector can be treated differently to the abuse of successive fixed-term contracts in the private sector, as long as the measures in place fulfil the principles of effectiveness and dissuasion and effectiveness. This must be verified by the national court.