El derecho del personal eventual a percibir trienios. Comentarios a propósito de la Sentencia del Tribunal de Justicia de la Unión Europea de 9 de julio de 2015 y de la Sentencia del Tribunal Supremo de 21 de enero de 2016

Abstract

A recent decision of the Spanish Supreme Court (SC), of 21 January 2016, has granted an employee a “three-yearly length-of-service increment”, after having held for decades different positions in the public-sector as non-permanent staff. Previously, on 9th of July 2015, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) had passed a judgement in a preliminary ruling referred by the Spanish SC, where the ECJ ruled the concept of a ‘fixed-term worker’ -within the meaning of the Council Directive 1999/70/EC of 28 June 1999 concerning the framework agreement on fixed-term work- should be interpreted as applying to a worker such as the applicant in the main proceedings. The case-law of the ECJ may have a significant impact in the Spanish legal system, where national legislation allows career civil servants to hold posts reserved for non-permanent staff and where a misuse of those positions is not rare. As a consequence, non-permanent staff may expectedly have a right to certain career civil servants’ benefits, such as the “three-yearly length-of-service increment”.