Mercadona dismisses a manager but the time-tracking record dismantles the lateness claim

A manager at Mercadona with fourteen years at the company was dismissed in December 2024 over a list of breaches. Among them, lateness and fraud in the time-tracking record: the company argued he clocked in at the store before his shift but didn’t start working until later. The High Court of Justice of Castilla-La Mancha has upheld the dismissal as fair. Even so, that particular accusation —the lateness one— fell apart along the way. It was dismantled by the company’s own time-tracking record, which proved the worker clocked in on time.

The case is interesting for anyone who sees time tracking only as a tool of control. A reliable record records what happened, not what the company finds convenient to prove, and here that ended up working against the very party that submitted it.

What the company alleged

The worker had been a Manager A since August 2010, on an afternoon shift from 1:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. The disciplinary dismissal letter, effective 18 December 2024, reproached him for several actions:

• Lateness and “fraud in the time-tracking record” on eight days in November and December 2024.
• Closing the till on 9 December to go to the bathroom without anyone arriving to cover him, and closing it early again that same afternoon.
• Spending 12 December talking to a colleague without attending to the customers waiting, to the point that another worker had to step in at the till.

On top of that, two prior incidents: a letter of commitment from August 2024 for talking with colleagues while on the tills, and a written reprimand from November for ringing up a relative at the till without reporting it afterwards to his superior.

The Social Court of Toledo ruled the dismissal fair in February 2026. The worker appealed.

The record contradicted the company itself

The interesting part lies in how the lateness charge was dismantled. The company had built it by cross-referencing two sources: the official time-tracking record, which marked entry to the store, and the till login record, which marked the moment the worker started ringing up sales. The theory was that a gap opened between clocking in and working.

When the High Court reviewed the proven facts, the numbers didn’t add up with the accusation. The official time-tracking record proved the worker clocked in at the store before his shift start time on all the days charged. The first-instance ruling had used till-start minutes copied straight from the dismissal letter; corrected against the submitted documents, those start times landed at the very start of the shift, 1:30 p.m. On the whole, the Chamber concludes the discrepancies “either don’t occur or are of one minute”, precisely because it was on record that the worker had already clocked in at the store.

Without a delay in the entry clock-in, the charge couldn’t stand. Nor did it reach the five monthly instances of lateness that Mercadona’s collective agreement requires to qualify the offence. The court dismissed it as a ground for the dismissal.

The procedural detail explains why this goes beyond the case. In an appeal, the court doesn’t reassess all the evidence: it only corrects the proven facts when a document reveals a manifest error. Here that document was the time-tracking record, with probative value conclusive enough to reverse what the first-instance court had accepted. It’s the reliability the time-tracking regulation pursues: an objective fact that doesn’t depend on either party’s version, not even on that of the party presenting it.

Why the dismissal was upheld anyway

That the lateness charge fell didn’t save the worker, and this is the other half of the ruling. The dismissal held on the conduct that was proven with documents and testimony: abandoning the till, the neglect of customers and, above all, the repeat-offence weight carried by the letter of commitment and the prior reprimand for ringing up a relative.

The appellant argued disproportion. Fourteen years’ seniority, no penalties to justify the harshest response, and a health condition that, he claimed, made him an especially vulnerable worker. The High Court applies here a relevant nuance of the gradualist doctrine: when the collective agreement classes a conduct as a very serious offence and does not set a graduation scale, judges cannot substitute themselves for the company in choosing the penalty. Mercadona’s agreement classes fraud and breach of trust as very serious and leaves management the power to penalise without setting modulation criteria. Without that internal scale, the court has no room to reduce the dismissal to a suspension.

The claim of nullity for discrimination over illness met the same fate. With a serious, proven disciplinary cause, the circumstantial picture of retaliation collapses. The dismissal is fair, with no compensation or back wages.

The ruling is not final: an appeal to unify case-law before the Supreme Court is still possible.

What a company takes away from this

The temptation to load a dismissal letter with every possible charge gets expensive when one of them doesn’t hold. The lateness one collapsed under the company’s own record, which nobody bothered to cross-check before accusing. The dismissal survived because the rest of the conducts were documented independently, with letters, reprimands and witnesses the lateness charge never had.

A digital time-tracking record has value precisely because it’s objective in both directions. It serves to prove a missing clock-in against the worker, as in other recent cases, and it serves to verify an accusation before putting it in writing. In this case it would have been enough to cross-check the entry to the store against the till start to see there was no lateness to charge.

That reliability is the backbone of the evidence in any dispute over working hours. With a manipulable or handwritten record, each party tells its version and whoever convinces the judge wins. With an objective record, with date, time and a trail of every change, the facts stop being argued and the debate moves to the legal ground, which is where it belongs.

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Source: Ruling STSJ CLM 1278/2026 (ECLI:ES:TSJCLM:2026:1278), Social Chamber of the High Court of Justice of Castilla-La Mancha in Albacete, section 1, 14 May 2026.

Legal note: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. The names of the people mentioned in the ruling have been anonymized in accordance with data protection regulations.