The Court heard a complaint about a German statute providing that an employer need not pay sick pay to a part-time worker. In at least seven member states part-time workers were predominantly women (the percentages ranging from 89% in the Federal Republic to 62% in Italy; only in Denmark, at 54%, was there anything close to parity). There was such a striking disparity between men and women that the question referred to the Court of Justice assumed that the proportion of women adversely affected was considerably greater than that of men, and the Court of Justice was concerned only with the issue of objective justification. Nine times as many women as men were disadvantaged, and no one was going to waste time in suggesting that the entire national workforce contained nine times as many women as men.
Europa Article 119 of the Treaty precludes national legislation which permits employers to exclude employees whose normal working hours do not exceed 10 hours a week or 45 hours a month from the continued payment of wages in the event of illness, if that measure affects a far greater number of women than men, unless the Member State shows that the legislation concerned is justified by objective factors unrelated to any discrimination on grounds of sex, which concern one of the essential aims of its social policy.
Citations:
C-171/88, R-171/88, [1989] EUECJ R-171/88, [1989] ECR 2743
Links:
Jurisdiction:
European
Cited by:
Cited – Hockenjos v Secretary of State for Social Security (No 2) CA 21-Dec-2004
The claimant shared child care with his former partner, but claimed that the system which gave the job-seeker’s child care supplement to one party only was discriminatory.
Held: In such cases the supplement usually went to the mother, and this . .
Cited – Secretary of State for Trade and Industry v Rutherford and others HL 3-May-2006
The claimant sought to establish that as a male employee, he had suffered sex discrimination in that he lost rights to redundancy pay after the age of retirement where a woman might not.
Held: The appeal was dismised. There were very few . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Discrimination
Updated: 06 July 2022; Ref: scu.215719