The Court of Instance number 2 of Logroño has ruled in favor of an employee of the Rioja Society of Comprehensive Care SAU, considering the permanent shift change that the company imposed on her in January 2025. The ruling orders the worker to be restored to the central schedule she had, after the company transferred her to the afternoon shift against his will.
The employee, with more than a decade of seniority in the company, performs her job as telephone manager in different internal services, adapting to previous changes in position and schedules without any relevant incidents being recorded in their performance. However, the situation took a turn when management formally communicated a substantial modification to his working conditions, permanently assigning him to the afternoon shift.
The measure, notified at the beginning of January and effective from the 20th of that same month, implied a notable change with respect to its usual schedule, going from a central day to an evening shift. which lasted until 10:00 p.m..
The company justified this decision with the need to reinforce this time slot, alleging organizational and productive reasons. According to the business communication, the objective was to redistribute workers with more experience to improve service performance and guarantee better service, especially in those areas where a lower presence of qualified personnel was detected.
This change did not occur in an isolated context, but in the midst of an internal reorganization of the team. The department in which the plaintiff worked had experienced changes in its composition during the previous year, including staff transfers and new hires. In this scenario, the company chose to keep the most senior employees on the morning shiftalso taking into account their preferences, while the affected worker, third in seniority, was assigned to the afternoon shift along with more recent personnel.
The business decision had consequences beyond the strictly work sphere. Just a few weeks after the new schedule came into effect, the worker started a temporary disability process derived from an anxiety disorder, prolonged for several months.
Faced with this situation, the employee went to the social jurisdiction requesting the annulment of the measure or, alternatively, its declaration as unjustified. In his complaint he questioned the real existence of the organizational causes alleged by the company, maintaining that the change did not respond to objective needs of the service. For its part, the company defended the legality of its decision, insisting that the reorganization sought a better distribution of resources and greater operational efficiency.
The court’s resolution is based on article 41 of the Workers’ Statute, which regulates under what conditions a company can substantially modify the working day and hours of its employees. For this action to be valid, there must be economic, technical, organizational or production reasons, sufficiently accredited.
In this way, the judge has determined that the company failed to prove real productive or organizational causes. “The tests carried out, however, They do not prove that there are organizational causes nor productive since it has not been proven that in the period (…) there was any incident in the service,” he explains.
For this reason, the court has declared the modification as unjustifiedalthough not void, and has ordered it to be voided immediately. The company must thus restore the affected at your previous timereincorporating it into the central shift.
