Europe fines Spain 6.8 million euros for delays in implementing law to increase parental leave
The Court of Justice of the EU issued the ruling just a few days after central government ministers approved the regulation at a cabinet meeting
The EU has proposed to impose a 6.8-million-euro penalty on Spain for failing to implement the new directive on parental leave in time. This happened just a few days after Spain's council of ministers approved the regulation to increase parental leave from 16 to 19 weeks, the last two to be taken at any point by the time the child turns eight. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued a judgement in which it upheld the appeal brought by the European Commission in January 2024 for this reason.
The CJEU proposed a penalty of 6.8 million if the non-compliance persists after the judgment is delivered, in addition to a daily fine of 19,700 until Spain puts an end to the non-compliance. In the text, the CJEU rules that Spain has failed to comply with the transposition deadlines and orders it to pay the fine, plus the Commission's legal costs.
Brussels brought Spain before the CJEU, considering that the Spanish legal system was not complying with the deadlines established for the directive on work-life balance for parents and caregivers. It asked the CJEU to sentence Spain to 9,760 euros per day from 3 August 2022 (the deadline for transposing the directive was 2 August 2022). At the beginning of the month, the fine already exceeded 10 million euros.
The government had set 2 August 2024 as the deadline for applying for the two weeks of extra paid parental leave. But the problem is that the deadline for transposing the European directive was two-fold. The first expired on 2 August 2022, when the six weeks' paid leave was required. And the second, just two years later, called for the payment of another two weeks to bring the total to eight paid weeks for all parents for each child up to the age of eight.
The government confirmed that it will pay the fine to Brussels, which implies that it will no longer have to pay the daily penalty of 19,760 euros, as the three-week extension of birth and nursing leave came into force on Thursday, 31 July.
A government 'shortcut'
After receiving the ruling, the UGT trade union said that there had been no "social negotiation" prior to the extension of parental leave with the government and criticised the royal decree law approved last week as a "shortcut" that allows Spain to stop getting sanctioned for failing to comply with the European directive on reconciliation.
"The most painful thing and what, in our opinion, breaches the directive is that: who can afford eight weeks of unpaid leave? Therefore, I think that they have taken a shortcut to avoid being sanctioned," said Lola Navarro, deputy general secretary of the UGT. According to the union, the positive circumstance of extending leave cannot outweigh the fact that it will not reach every family, which makes it an "insufficient" measure. "A large number of children from these families are left out," Navarro said.
