Judgment of the Court of Justice Second Chamber, 15 December 2022, TimePartner Personalmanagement, C-311/21

• Date: 15 December 2022
• Year: 2022

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Thirdly, the Court rules that the competent authority may oppose the acquisition of a credit institution

without examining, in its decision, all of the assessment criteria set out in Directive 2013/36.

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It

states that, in accordance with the objective of ensuring the sound and prudent management of the

credit institution in which an acquisition is proposed, laid down in that directive, it is sufficient if there

are reasonable grounds for opposing the acquisition on the basis of one or more of those criteria.

VI. SOCIAL POLICY: TEMPORARY AGENCY WORKERS

Judgment of the Court of Justice (Second Chamber), 15 December 2022, TimePartner

Personalmanagement, C-311/21

Link to the full text of the judgment

Reference for a preliminary ruling – Employment and social policy – Temporary agency work – Directive

2008/104/EC – Article 5 – Principle of equal treatment – Need to respect, in the event of derogation from

that principle, the overall protection of temporary agency workers – Collective agreement providing for

lower pay than that of staff recruited directly by the user undertaking – Effective judicial protection –

Judicial review

Between January and April 2017, TimePartner Personalmanagement GmbH, a temporary-work

agency, employed CM as a temporary agency worker under a fixed-term contract. For the duration of

her assignment, CM worked at a retail user undertaking as an order handler.

For that work, she received a gross hourly wage of EUR 9.23, in accordance with the collective

agreement applicable to temporary agency workers concluded between two trade unions, of which

TimePartner Personalmanagement and CM were members respectively.

That collective agreement derogated from the principle of equal treatment recognised in German

law,

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by establishing, for temporary agency workers, a lower pay than that granted to the workers of

the user undertaking pursuant to the provisions of a collective agreement for retail workers in the

Land of Bavaria (Germany), namely, a gross hourly wage of EUR 13.64

CM brought a claim before the Arbeitsgericht Würzburg (Labour Court, Würzburg, Germany) seeking

additional pay of EUR 1 296.72, a sum equivalent to the difference in pay between the temporary

agency workers and comparable workers recruited directly by the user undertaking. In that regard,

she relied on a breach of the principle of equal treatment of temporary agency workers enshrined in

Article 5 of Directive 2008/104.

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After that claim was rejected in the first instance and on appeal, CM

lodged an appeal on a point of law before the Bundesar beitsgericht (Labour Federal Court, Germany),

which referred five questions to the Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling on the interpretation of

that provision.

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Criteria referred to in Article 23 of Directive 2013/36.

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For the time between January and March 2017, in the first sentence of Paragraph 10(4) of the Arbeitnehmerüberlassungsgesetz (Law on

temporary agency work) of 3 February 1995 (BGBl. 1995 I, p. 158), in its version applicable until 31 March 2017 and, for April 2017, in

Paragraph 8(1) of that law in its version applicable as from 1 April 2017.

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Directive 2008/104/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 November 2008 on temporary agency work (OJ 2008 L 327, p. 9).