Catalonia TSJ upholds the fine on Securitas for overtime

The High Court of Justice of Catalonia (Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Cataluña, TSJ Catalonia) has dismissed the appeal lodged by Securitas Seguridad España against a €7,000 fine for overtime. The Labour Inspectorate found that at a single security contract in Barcelona during 2022, one guard had worked 378 overtime hours, another 128, and two night guards, who by law cannot work overtime at all, had built up 326 and 334. The ruling is STSJ CAT 6966/2026, of 21 July (appeal 6740/2025).

For a company with a turnover of €589 million in 2021, according to the inspection report, €7,000 is not much money. But Securitas itself maintains that the Barcelona Inspectorate issued it at least 33 inspection reports over similar conduct, one for each site where its guards worked, totalling €102,543, and it appealed on the grounds of unequal treatment compared with other provinces. Neither the first-instance court nor the TSJ agreed.

The overtime the Inspectorate found

The inspection began with a formal request to the company about eight guards on the security service Securitas provided at the headquarters of a professional association in Barcelona. The Inspectorate asked for the collective agreement, the contracts, the 2022 time records and, worker by worker, the hours worked during the year compared with the agreement’s working hours, the overtime and the night hours.

Based on that documentation, supplied by the company itself, the inspection report of 21 June 2023 found two separate breaches proven:

• Two guards classed as night workers had worked overtime in 2022 (326 and 334 hours). Article 36.1 of the Workers’ Statute prohibits this.
• Two others had exceeded the cap of 80 overtime hours a year set by article 35.2 of the Workers’ Statute, one with 128 and the other with 378, almost five times the limit.

At the hearing before the Inspectorate, the company’s representative admitted that those hours had not been worked to prevent accidents or urgent damage and had not been compensated with time off either. That ruled out the two exceptions in article 35, because overtime compensated with time off within the following four months and overtime due to force majeure do not count towards the 80-hour cap.

Each breach was classified as a serious infringement under article 7.5 of the LISOS (the Spanish law on labour infringements and sanctions), which penalises breaches of the legal limits on working time, night work and overtime. The Inspectorate proposed €3,500 for each one, in the medium band, with two aggravating factors: the company’s turnover and the number of workers affected.

Securitas’s argument, and why it did not work

Securitas accepted the hours and appealed against the way it had been sanctioned. It argued that in other provinces (Guadalajara, Biscay, Cádiz, Girona, Madrid) the Inspectorate had imposed a single €7,500 sanction for the same conduct, whereas in Barcelona the inspection had been split by work site until it added up to 33 reports. In its view this breached equal treatment in inspection activity, legal certainty and legitimate expectations.

Social Court No. 29 of Barcelona had already rejected that argument in April 2025, with reasoning the TSJ reproduces and endorses. For a security company, it said, the guards’ workplace is the client site where they provide the service, not the registered office or the regional management that gives them instructions, and it cited two 2017 Supreme Court rulings along the same lines. What is sanctioned is each infringement where it is committed. Sanctioning only once at the registered office, the court added, would lead to the absurdity of sanctioning just once when multiple infringements have in fact been committed (“llevaría al absurdo de sólo sancionar una vez cuando en realidad se han producido múltiples infracciones”) and would allow the company to keep committing them.

The court went further and asked whether Securitas had in fact come out ahead, since the Inspectorate grouped the four workers into a single report instead of issuing one per worker. The company also argued that the guards worked the overtime voluntarily to boost their pay. The court dismissed that too, because the limits in articles 35 and 36 bind the employer, who is the one requesting and paying for those hours, regardless of whether the worker asks for them.

An appeal that could only challenge procedure

The TSJ never got as far as reviewing the merits of the case. Administrative fines below €18,000 do not ordinarily qualify for an appeal for reversal (recurso de suplicación), and the first-instance court refused to admit it. Securitas managed to open that route through a complaint appeal (recurso de queja), but only to allege essential procedural defects. The TSJ says so expressly: it could not rule on the merits.

That is why the chamber examines whether the first-instance judgment responded to the company’s arguments (the so-called failure to address the claims, or incongruencia omisiva) and concludes that it did, both on legitimate expectations and on the proportionality of the fine. On proportionality it relies on the CJEU judgment of 3 July 2025 (case C-733/2023), which requires sanctions to be dissuasive without going beyond what is necessary, and on Supreme Court ruling STS 167/2026, of 17 February, on how penalties are graded under the LISOS. It considers the amount in line with the company’s turnover and the number of workers affected.

For a company, this means a small fine is won or lost almost entirely at first instance, because any later appeal is heavily restricted. The site-by-site approach comes out reinforced, although the TSJ only validates the first-instance court’s reasoning and does not rule on the merits. The ruling is not final and can be challenged before the Supreme Court through an appeal for the unification of doctrine (recurso de casación para la unificación de doctrina). For now, on top of the €7,000, Securitas must pay €800 in legal costs and loses the deposit it lodged to appeal.

The time records were used as evidence against the company

In this case nobody questioned the reliability of the records. Securitas had the figures for every worker and handed them over when asked, and it was that same data that allowed the Inspectorate to count the overtime hour by hour. Having complete records did not prevent the fine, because what they showed was the excess. Checked in time, they would have shown that same excess months before the Inspectorate’s request.

To reach 378 overtime hours in a year, the guard must have passed 80 well before the year was out, and the running total would have shown it. With night workers there is no margin at all, because the prohibition is absolute and the very first overtime hour is already an infringement. Reviewing the running total every month leaves time to reorganise shifts, bring in extra staff or compensate with time off within the four months allowed by article 35.2.

The per-site approach explains why the bill in Barcelona went above €100,000 when, according to the company, in other provinces it stayed at €7,500, and it affects any company that provides services at its clients’ premises. We cover the limit and its exceptions in more detail in our guide on how many overtime hours can be worked per year, and the scale of fines in time tracking penalties.

The new Royal Decree on digital time tracking, still going through the approval process and with no publication date yet in the BOE (Spain’s Official State Gazette), provides for the Inspectorate to have remote access to time records and requires daily and monthly totals. With that access, the Inspectorate could carry out a count like the one in this case without asking the company for any documents.

How Cleverfy solves it

Cleverfy is time tracking and working-hours registration software for SMEs and self-employed businesses in Spain. In a company that works at its clients’ premises, such as a security firm, it keeps in view what in this case only came to light through a request from the Inspectorate:

• It detects when someone exceeds their working hours and calculates and totals each worker’s overtime, so the running total for the year is available at any time.
• It identifies night hours (from 22:00 to 6:00), which are the basis for the night-work bonus and for the ban on overtime for night workers.
• Staff are organised by work site and department, so the data can be reviewed for each client where the service is provided.
• Guards clock in from their phone at the client’s site, with proof of location.
• You can ask the AI assistant “give me last month’s overtime” and it returns the summary without building reports by hand.

You can see all the features, try it free for 14 days, book a demo or see our plans.

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This article provides general information about a specific court ruling and does not constitute legal advice. For specific situations, please consult an employment lawyer.

Sources:

• STSJ CAT 6966/2026, of 21 July (Social Chamber, appeal 6740/2025), CENDOJ
• Workers’ Statute, arts. 35 and 36
• LISOS (Royal Legislative Decree 5/2000), arts. 7.5, 39 and 40