Time tracking in hospitality: Jordi Cruz’s ABaC ordered to pay overtime

The Catalan High Court of Justice (TSJ Cataluña) has confirmed a ruling against Restaurante ABaC SL, the three-Michelin-star Barcelona restaurant of chef Jordi Cruz, ordering it to pay €4,941.32 in overtime (plus 10% statutory default interest) to a former floor manager. The decision is STSJ CAT 2738/2026, dated 13 April 2026, with Judge Sanz Marcos as rapporteur, and dismisses the company’s appeal in full.

On top of the trial-court award, ABaC now also has to pay €500 in legal costs to the worker’s lawyer and forfeits the deposit it lodged when it appealed. The counterclaim through which ABaC was demanding 122.61 hours back from the worker is also dismissed.

What matters more than the headline figure is the reason the appeal collapsed. Time tracking at ABaC was done through facial recognition, and whenever the system failed it was replaced by paper sheets. Those sheets never made it into the case file.

How time tracking actually worked at ABaC

The decisive part of the judgment is in the fifth proven fact. The company had a digital register based on facial recognition. A witness, also a worker at the restaurant, testified that the system sometimes failed and that on those days clock-in was kept on a parallel paper register.

The worker did 4-on / 2-off shifts under three rotating schedules typical of fine dining: a split afternoon-evening shift (14:30–17:30 and 19:30–01:00/01:30), a long 09:00–20:00 day, and a 14:00–00:30 stretch. The Catalan hospitality collective agreement sets working time at 1,791 hours per year.

When the worker asked the court to compel the company to produce the paper records, the trial judge issued an order on 21 July 2023, with the explicit warning under section 94.2 LRJS: failure to produce documents without good cause may lead the court to take the opposing party’s allegations as proven. ABaC did not appeal that order, and never produced the sheets.

Why this single detail sinks the appeal

ABaC tried a fresh narrative on appeal. It argued that the days with no facial-recognition entry simply matched the worker’s 4+2 days off, not system failures. In other words: the paper records never existed because the digital one never failed.

The High Court is unpersuaded. The trial judge had already weighed the evidence under the standard of reasoned evaluation, combining two sources: the testimony confirming the breakdowns and the parallel paper register, plus the ficta documentatio effect under section 94.2 LRJS for failing to produce what was ordered. With those two pieces in place, there is no plain error allowing the proven facts to be reopened on appeal.

The court reminds the parties of consolidated Supreme Court doctrine: “failure to produce documents must be assessed by the trial court, since the rule entitles, but does not compel, the judge to deem facts proven through ficta documentatio” (Supreme Court rulings of 12 January 2022 and 17 December 2025). Here the trial judge did exercise that power, and the rest of the reasoning follows from it.

The CJEU framework and the burden of proof

The judgment leans on the CJEU ruling of 14 May 2019 (Case C-55/18, CCOO v Deutsche Bank), the decision that pushed Spain to introduce mandatory time tracking through Royal Decree-Law 8/2019. The practical rule is narrow: if the employer fails to keep a reliable register, it is enough for the worker to bring a piece of evidence showing overtime was worked for the presumption under section 217.7 of the Spanish Civil Procedure Act to flip in their favour.

The burden then shifts to the employer to prove that those hours weren’t worked, or that they were offset with rest periods. ABaC produced no credible alternative count: it relied on data from a digital register it itself acknowledged was incomplete. The court puts it bluntly: “it cannot serve as the sole evidentiary basis, since there are many days … with no entries, days that must correspond with those when the facial-recognition system was not working”.

The trial court accepted overtime amounting to 381 hours and 5 minutes for the period claimed (381.083 hours in the judgment), multiplied by the agreed €12.82 hourly rate, plus an extra €55.84 in salary differences after offset adjustments.

The other problem the judgment doesn’t address: GDPR

The ruling stays within the employment-law and evidentiary scope. It does not assess whether facial-recognition clock-in was lawful in itself. That distinction matters, because the case can’t be read solely through the overtime lens.

The Spanish Data Protection Authority (AEPD) has been clear for some time: biometric time tracking — fingerprint, facial recognition, iris — is, by default, unlawful for employee attendance control. The reason sits in Article 9 of the GDPR: facial features are special-category data, their processing requires a strengthened legal basis, and ordinary time tracking simply doesn’t have one. The AEPD has already fined companies for using exactly this kind of system. We unpack the detail in why biometric clock-in is no longer legal in 2026 and in how time tracking and GDPR fit together.

If a restaurant of this profile were to entrust its entire time tracking to facial recognition today, with no serious data protection impact assessment behind it, the risk would be twofold: the evidentiary problem the High Court has already exposed, and the prospect that the AEPD treats the biometric processing as having no lawful basis at all. A penalty along those lines would involve sums of a wholly different order to €4,941.

A clear parallel with the recent ‘crossed-out records’ case

This decision lands a few weeks after STSJ CAT 1546/2026, in which the same chamber upheld a 928-hour overtime award against an employer whose paper sheets were riddled with crossings-out and corrections. The framing is identical: time records must be reliable and auditable; once they aren’t, the presumption flips. We covered that case here.

Paper itself isn’t what carries the day. What carries the day is whether there’s an auditable trail when someone asks for it in court. A digital system without a credible fallback when it fails, or with manual corrections that leave no trace, sits awkwardly against the standard the CJEU and the Supreme Court have been building.

What this means for the hospitality sector

Hospitality runs on split shifts, schedules that cross midnight, last-minute cover and service peaks. That has nudged a slice of the sector toward facial-recognition tablets at the kitchen door: it’s fast and harder to spoof.

A system going down is something every clock-in setup has to plan for. What matters in court is what comes next. The employer needs a fallback that can actually be produced: complete records, kept for the four years required by section 34.9 of the Workers’ Statute, with the same traceability as the main system. A sheet without signatures, without the precise date and time of the facial-system failure, and without cross-checking against the digital log feeds doubt rather than dispelling it.

For restaurants already running a biometric setup, the safest move today is to switch off facial recognition unless there is a specific impact assessment and a collective agreement or rule clearly backing it, and to shift clock-in toward non-biometric methods — personal PIN, mobile app with proportionate geolocation, card — that generate the same traceability without touching Article 9 data. We summarised the sector-specific options in time tracking in hospitality with rotating shifts.

Before the problem becomes a claim

STSJ CAT 2738/2026 turns on a very specific detail: the trial court’s order of 21 July 2023 required ABaC to produce the paper records, the company didn’t, and the chamber drew everything else from that absence. ABaC walks out of the proceedings with the trial-court award intact, costs awarded against it, the appeal deposit forfeited, and its own counterclaim dismissed.

If your time-tracking setup relies on a single method and you have no quick way of showing what happened when it failed, this deserves an internal review this week, not when the conciliation summons lands. You can see how the burden of proof shifts depending on whether there’s a reliable register, or book a Cleverfy demo with full traceability to see what that audit trail looks like out of the box.

The judgment is not yet final: a cassation appeal for unification of doctrine before the Social Chamber of the Supreme Court is available within ten days of notification.

Frequently asked questions

Is facial-recognition clock-in legal in Spain? By default, no. The Spanish DPA (AEPD) treats it as Article 9 GDPR special-category biometric data, which requires a reinforced legal basis. Ordinary time tracking does not have that basis, so without a thorough data protection impact assessment and a specific law or collective agreement backing it, facial recognition is unlawful for time tracking.

What happens if the digital time-tracking system fails and there is no record? The presumption under section 217.7 of the Spanish Civil Procedure Act kicks in, in line with the CJEU ruling of 14 May 2019. It is enough for the worker to bring a reasonable piece of evidence of overtime: the burden shifts to the employer to prove those hours weren’t worked or were offset, and if no record is produced when ordered, the presumption holds. That means the system has to let you fill the gaps without losing the trail. In Cleverfy, clock-ins can be entered or corrected retroactively when there’s an outage or a missed punch; every change requires two-way approval —worker and employer— and is logged with author, timestamp and reason, in line with the traceability and integrity standard the new Spanish royal decree on time tracking is setting out.

How much does ABaC have to pay after STSJ CAT 2738/2026? €4,941.32 in overtime plus 10% statutory default interest to a former floor manager, €500 in costs awarded to the worker’s lawyer, and forfeit of the deposit ABaC lodged when it appealed. The counterclaim through which ABaC was demanding 122.61 hours back from the worker is also dismissed.

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Image: Jordi Cruz in the kitchen of Restaurante ABaC, Barcelona, by Lou Stejskal, cropped for this publication, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sources: judgment STSJ CAT 2738/2026 (ECLI:ES:TSJCAT:2026:2738), available through CENDOJ. AEPD Guidance on biometric attendance-control processing. CJEU 14 May 2019, Case C-55/18.

Legal note: This article is provided for information only and does not constitute legal advice. The judgment is not final; a cassation appeal for unification of doctrine is available before the Social Chamber of the Supreme Court.