Rewriting your clock-in procedure without negotiating: Canary Islands High Court voids CIRCET's new policy

The High Court of Justice of the Canary Islands has confirmed the nullity of the new time-recording procedure that CIRCET Infraestructuras de Telecomunicaciones rolled out to its workforce on 18 October 2023. The ruling is STSJ ICAN 657/2026, dated 25 February 2026 (judgment by Ramos Real J.), and it dismisses in full the company’s appeal (suplicación) against the first-instance decision of Labour Court No. 5 of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, which had already upheld the collective dispute claim brought by CCOO Canarias trade union and the works council.

Changing the clock-in system, on its own, does not turn the decision into a substantial modification of working conditions. Article 41 of the Workers’ Statute (Estatuto de los Trabajadores) was triggered by the additional content CIRCET folded into the same document: new rules on holidays, leave and excess hours that narrowed the workforce’s room for manoeuvre and had not been agreed in any collective bargaining instrument.

What CIRCET told its workforce on 18 October 2023

The company — part of the French group of the same name that builds and maintains telecoms networks — already had a clock-in system in place under which staff registered start and finish times. The novelty was a document titled Procedure for Completing the Working Time Record, built around the “ADCAB” application, which combined two very different things.

One part was operational: start and finish times, breaks, the project against which the day was logged, the ability to amend entries before they were validated by a manager, a one-week window to record a missed shift. All of that lines up with the standard functionality of any digital clock-in tool.

The other part reached considerably further:

• Holidays: requests had to be filed sixty calendar days in advance, with the employer’s reply due up to fifteen days before the start date and silence treated as a refusal.
• Paid leave: fifteen days’ notice, a reply within seven, silence treated as a refusal.
• Trade union leave: forty-eight hours’ notice, with the small mercy that here silence counted as authorisation.
• Compensation for public holidays and days for overtime worked, on-call duty or weekends: fifteen days’ notice, silence treated as a refusal.
• Excess hours under the collective agreement: thirty days’ notice, silence treated as a refusal.
• Overtime and remote working: required the manager’s prior approval or were not authorised.
• Hierarchical validation of declared hours: the hours entered by the worker would only become effective once the manager validated them.

None of those deadlines or silence regimes appeared in the Steel, Metal and Electrical Installations Collective Agreement for the Province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, nor in the III National Collective Agreement for the metal industry, technology and services sector — the two instruments that applied to CIRCET. There was no prior conversation with the works council, no consultation period opened, no exchange of views at any stage.

The line between ius variandi and substantial modification

The court’s reasoning rests on article 41 of the Workers’ Statute. The provision gives the employer a discretionary power to alter contractual conditions without individual agreement, conditional on two things: that genuine economic, technical, organisational or production grounds exist, and that the procedure is followed.

The conditions expressly listed in article 41 — working time, schedule, distribution of working hours, remuneration system, work system, duties — do not exhaust the field. Long-settled Supreme Court case law (the judgment cites the judgments of 25 November 2015, 22 January 2014, 22 June 2016 and 17 December 2004, among others) has consistently held that the “material” character does not refer to the condition itself being substantive but to the modification itself being substantive. What counts is the scale of the change and the level of detriment or sacrifice the alteration imposes on the worker.

The court splits CIRCET’s document into two parts:

“Certainly, these provisions can in part be understood as instructions addressed to workers so that they comply with the new working-time recording system, without amounting to a significant or relevant change in a basic aspect of the employment relationship that could be classed as onerous; they do not constitute substantial modifications of working conditions but rather a change to the clock-in system covered by the regular exercise of the employer’s managerial and organisational powers (ordinary ius variandi).”

And then:

“But we also find that the defendant company, taking advantage of the introduction of the new clock-in system and its ‘instructions’, has introduced other measures that do amount to relevant changes in the employment relationship of its workers and that far exceed that ordinary ius variandi…”

The new requirements on holidays, leave, compensation and excess hours, the court says, become noticeably different conditions. Because they affect the entire workforce, they are collective substantial modifications within the meaning of article 41.

Why nullity is automatic when no consultation period is opened

Article 41.4 of the Workers’ Statute is demanding on form. A collective MSCT requires a consultation period of up to fifteen days with statutory workers’ representation, held before the decision, in which the parties negotiate in good faith over the causes, the possibility of avoiding or reducing the impact, and measures to mitigate the consequences. Once the decision is notified, thirty days’ notice must elapse before it takes effect.

The High Court restates settled case law on this point: negotiation must come first, not later, and the requirement is not satisfied by a simple notice to the works council, by a meeting convened once the decision has already been taken, or by an invitation to comment on something already decided. It quotes verbatim the Catalonia TSJ judgment of 28 September 2000, which is unusually clear on why a formal breach renders the measure void even where substantive grounds may have existed:

“…the formal requirements set out in the legal provision are aimed at safeguarding the guarantees of workers, who cannot have their work arrangements altered immediately without the chance to adjust their working lives.”

CIRCET did not open consultations. The court resolves the point by leaning on the statute: “this means that the measure is null and void with no need to assess its justification”. The quality or sufficiency of any organisational reasons the company might have invoked falls outside the judicial analysis once the form has been breached.

The Labour Inspectorate had spotted it months earlier

On 7 May 2024 the Labour and Social Security Inspectorate (Inspección de Trabajo y Seguridad Social) served a notice of serious infringement on CIRCET. The reasoning is almost identical to the one the High Court would later use: “not only has the time period provided in article 64 of the Workers’ Statute to issue a report not been granted, but there has also been no exchange of views nor any opening of a dialogue or meeting between the parties, with the company proceeding unilaterally to implement the change to the time-recording system”.

The sanction attached to that notice was 751 euros. The company challenged it separately and the labour-jurisdiction judgment does not resolve that challenge. What is confirmed is that the substantive reading of the inspecting officer and that of the labour court run in parallel: for the Inspectorate, the omission of the statutory information procedure with workers’ representation was a serious infringement of article 64; for the labour jurisdiction, that same omission rendered the measure void for breach of article 41.4. Administrative sanction and procedural consequence live on different planes but rest on the same procedural defect. We have covered the type of penalties the Inspectorate can impose for time-recording failures in detail, as well as how labour inspections actually run once an inspector arrives at a company.

Why the court refuses an à la carte nullity

CIRCET tried a halfway house on appeal. In the alternative, it asked the High Court — should it find that some sections of the procedure amounted to MSCT while others did not — to declare only the problematic ones void and leave the rest standing.

The court rejects the idea with a dry procedural argument: splitting the cause of action separates claims that are interlinked and must be resolved together, which would breach the principle that a single dispute is decided as a whole. The consequence for document design is significant: when a company packages clock-in procedure and substantive policy into a single PDF without negotiating the second part, it cannot later ask the judge to rescue the operational sections while the problematic ones are struck down.

What this changes in practice ahead of the new Royal Decree

The judgment lands in the closing stretch of the approval process for the new Royal Decree on Digital Time Recording, which the labour minister has said is expected before 21 June 2026. The draft Royal Decree adds formal requirements that multiply the risk of incidents like CIRCET’s. One of the novelties is the obligation to approve a time-recording protocol with a detailed procedure, a periodic evaluation system and specific staff training. A protocol of that scope almost inevitably touches substantive territory: how overtime is authorised, how leave is requested, how corrections are handled.

The purely operational layer of clock-in — what is recorded, where, how missed entries are corrected, what audit trail accompanies each movement — remains within the ordinary managerial power and does not require a consultation period with statutory workers’ representation. Any substantive rule that appears inside the same protocol (lead times for booking holidays, deemed-refusal silences, hierarchical sign-offs that gate the recognition of hours, leave requirements not contemplated by the collective agreement) crosses into article 41.4 territory and pulls in the consultation period. Sitting on top of those two layers is a third, structural check: where both live inside a single document rolled out without consultations, the whole package collapses, without partial nullity stepping in to rescue the harmless sections.

In companies with internal statutory representation, this translates into keeping the technical rulebook of the clock-in system separate from the substantive rulebook on leave, holidays and excess hours. The first sits inside the ordinary ius variandi; the second requires a collective bargaining agreement, a collective pact or the article 41 procedure with consultations and thirty days’ notice.

For companies without statutory representation, the filter is the same: any change that introduces new onerousness above the applicable collective agreement, even when dressed up as a “system instruction”, can be challenged individually under article 138 of the Labour Procedure Act (LRJS).

How a digital time-recording system fits into this landscape

The paradox of the case is that a well-designed digital system should help to separate these two layers rather than fold them together. The operational layer — how you clock in, how missed entries are corrected, what audit trail remains for each modification — is exactly what a time-tracking tool has to cover by default if it intends to meet the forthcoming Royal Decree: immutable record, two-way modifications with author and reason, four-year retention, access for the Inspectorate.

The substantive layer — policies for approving overtime, deadlines for requesting leave, hierarchical sign-offs — is a decision for each company and should live in a separate document, negotiated with statutory workers’ representation where required and published through the appropriate channel. Where both layers share a single corporate PDF rolled out without consultations, the High Court ends up voiding the entire package, not only the substantive section.

We have unpicked the structure of the new time-recording regime and what the Royal Decree will require in what a time-tracking tool needs to comply with the new regulation and in how to comply with the law step by step. For a look at how that separation translates into a concrete tool — clock-in and audit trail by default, configurable policies on the side — any 15-minute demo will do.

What to expect next

The ruling is not final: a cassation appeal for the unification of doctrine can still be brought before the Labour Chamber of the Supreme Court within ten days of notification. The Canary Islands court also orders the forfeiture of the deposit that CIRCET had to lodge to bring its appeal.

Whatever the outcome of any such appeal, the rest of the companies that will rewrite their time-recording procedures in the coming months to align them with the new Royal Decree are operating on a narrower margin from here on. Going through the article 41 channel where the protocol adds new substantive rules weighs more than any consideration of speed of rollout. And where technical instructions end up living alongside policies on leave, holidays or overtime that have not been put through consultations, a trade union or an individual worker can challenge the whole document under article 138 LRJS — with the operational complication that nullity forces the prior conditions to be restored even when the system has been running for months.

Frequently asked questions

Is changing the clock-in system a substantial modification of working conditions? Not on its own. The Canary Islands High Court in STSJ ICAN 657/2026 makes clear that operational instructions on how working time is recorded — what gets entered, on which screen, how a forgotten entry is corrected — fall within the employer’s ordinary managerial powers and are not a substantial modification. The line is crossed when, inside the same procedure, the employer slips in substantive rules that make life harder for workers: long lead times to request holidays or leave, deemed-refusal silences, hierarchical sign-offs that gate the recognition of hours worked. That is an MSCT and requires the consultation period under article 41.4 of the Workers’ Statute.

What does article 41 of the Workers’ Statute require for a collective substantial modification? A consultation period of up to fifteen days with statutory workers’ representation, held before the decision, in which the parties negotiate in good faith over the causes, ways to avoid or reduce the impact, and measures to soften the consequences. Once it ends, the company must give thirty days’ notice to affected workers before the change takes effect. A simple notice to the works council, a meeting held after the rollout, or an invitation to comment on a done deal does not satisfy the procedure.

What happens if a company implements an MSCT without opening consultations? The employer’s decision is null and void. The court does not even assess whether economic, technical, organisational or production grounds existed to justify it. In practice, the workers must be restored to their previous conditions and, in this case, the company also faces an additional Labour Inspectorate sanction for a serious infringement of article 64 of the Workers’ Statute for failing to give statutory workers’ representation time to issue its report.

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Sources: judgment STSJ ICAN 657/2026 (ECLI:ES:TSJICAN:2026:657), available through CENDOJ. Notice of serious infringement from the Labour and Social Security Inspectorate dated 7 May 2024 (referenced in the fifth finding of fact). Articles 41 and 64 of the Workers’ Statute. Court excerpts translated from the Spanish original.

Image: an empty meeting room, by Breather on Unsplash, cropped for this publication and distributed via Wikimedia Commons under a public-domain dedication (CC0 1.0).

Legal notice: This article is informational and does not constitute legal advice. The ruling is not final; a cassation appeal for the unification of doctrine may still be brought before the Labour Chamber of the Supreme Court within the legally prescribed time limit.