ECJ The Court of Justice is in principle bound to give a preliminary ruling if the questions raised by the national court or tribunal, which is best placed to appreciate, in the light of the circumstances of the case, the necessity of obtaining a preliminary ruling, have to do with the interpretation of a provision of Community law. In particular, the Court cannot refuse to supply the national court with the elements of Community law which it seeks on the basis of the argument that the ruling might lead the court to annul national provisions and thus create a legal vacuum in national law. Article 119 of the Treaty and Article 1 of Directive 75/117 on the approximation of the laws of the Member States relating to the application of the principle of equal pay for men and women does not prevent collective agreements from restricting payment of overtime supplements, for both part -time and full-time employees, to cases where the normal working hours fixed by them are exceeded, excluding hours worked in excess of the hours fixed by individual contracts. Such rules do not result in part-time employees being treated differently to full-time employees because the former receive the same overall pay as full-time employees for the same number of hours worked, whether or not the normal working hours fixed by collective agreement are exceeded, overtime supplements being paid to all categories of employees only when those normal working hours are exceeded.
Citations:
C-399/92, [1994] ECR I-5727, [1994] EUECJ C-399/92
Links:
Jurisdiction:
European
Cited by:
Cited – Barry v Midland Bank Plc HL 22-Jul-1999
The defendant implemented a voluntary retirement scheme under which benefits were calculated according to the period of service of the employee. The plaintiff claimed that the scheme discriminated against workers who had taken career breaks, and . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Discrimination
Updated: 16 August 2022; Ref: scu.161015