The Las Palmas Social Chamber (Canary Islands) has ruled against the objective economic grounds that a hospitality sector business invoked in order to terminate an employee’s contract, some of whose tasks had been replaced by automated administrative software, and if upheld the payment for which would have been 20 days compensation for every career year worked. The ruling found that the termination of employment could not be based on objective economic grounds and that automating tasks in order to lower costs was effectively ‘reducing the right to work in order to increase company freedoms’, and as such terminating employment in this situation constituted a termination without objective economic grounds warranting compensation of up to 33 days per career year.
The ruling concerns a situation from March 2019 when the hotel chain Lopesan Hotel Management SL, on Grand Canaria Island terminated the employment contract of an employee who had been working in the group’s accounting division for 13 years since 2006. The employee’s employment termination occurred three months after the company bought robotic process automation (Jidoka) software, specialized in recovery payments management, in December 2018.
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