In a case concerning a national pay system which leads part-time workers – notably women – to be less paid than their colleagues working full-time whereas they work, with extra hours, the same amount of hours, the Court of Justice retains that, to determine wage discrimination, it is necessary to check if the two categories of workers are paid the same for the same number of working hours. (Ref. 071009)
In the German civil service, a teacher working part-time with extra hours up to the same time volume as a teacher working full-time gets less paid than the latter, because they are paid less than “regular” hours. Seized by a complainant who denounced this inequality, a German jurisdiction adressed to the CJEC a preliminary rulling to determine if this situation did not represent indirect gender-based discrimination – forbidden by European law – since women represent a majority of part-time workers, and more specifically a violation of article 141 of the EC treaty which sets the principle of equal pay between men and women.
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