The Danish Supreme Court has ruled that a medical diagnosis is not required when deciding whether a person suffers from a disability protected under Directive 2000/78.

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.

The Employment Appeal Tribunal (‘EAT’) has confirmed that, even if an employee is not actually disabled for the purpose of the relevant statutory test, it is unlawful for an employer to discriminate against that employee because of a perceived disability.

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.

The general protection against dismissal under Austrian labour law only applies if at least five employees are employed permanently. The special provisions for air carriers under Austrian law only apply to air carriers that have their principal place of business in Austria. Whether foreign businesses and their employees employed outside Austria should be afforded protection against dismissal remains unresolved.

The German Federal Labour Court has held that it was justifiable for the employment of an actor to be limited in time because of the “type of work” involved and the fact that the work was with a film production company, even though the actor was given a number of fixed term employment contracts over around 18 years.

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.

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.

A mobility clause must be sufficiently precise, but this condition can still be fulfilled even if the clause tries to cover both current and possible future locations of the company, provided any future locations are still within France and provided any change of location is justified by the needs of the business.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

Differences in compensation at the end of employment between fixed-term and permanent workers is found non-discriminatory, as the different types of compensation meet different objectives.

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.