Equal Treatment Principle

It is apt to recall the principle of equal treatment recently highlighted in a Federal Court case. This principle is sometimes misinterpreted. According to that principle the employer is legally obliged to treat all his employees equally. This is also true when he sets up a pay
increase scheme. Therefore he is only allowed to make distinctions on reasonable grounds even though the pay increase is made voluntarily. He is prohibited from arbitrarily setting up conditions that have to be met for qualifying for the increase resulting in the exclusion of a part of the work force. In the case before the court the employer had 300 employees. He increased the pay as of 1st of January 2007 by 2,5 per cent excluding only 14 employees - among them the plaintiff. These employees previously refused to accept a deterioration in their employment terms in the year 2004 while the other employees accepted a reduction in their vacation from 30 days to 25 days and a decrease in the vacation payment by 50 per cent. The employer offered the
plaintiff the 2,5 per cent pay increase only on the condition that he too would agree to those unfavorable terms. The plaintiff refused. The matter went to court.

The action demanding the pay increase remained unsuccessful in all instances. Although the employer is bound to abide by the principle of equal treatment, he did not act arbitrarily. He specifically referred to the objective of the pay increase, namely to partly offset with it the loss in income incurred by the employees in 2004. As the plaintiff did not suffer any loss, he was not entitled to participate in the increase.

Rechtsanwalt_Jain@yahoo.de

Hello Mr.Jain,

Thanks for the useful information.

I have some question related to employer.

1. After working for 8 years and you don´t see any increase in salary is there any
law which say after certain years of employment you should have some increment in salary.

2. Employer increase the pay for certain people and does´nt increase your salary since he have
special connection to them.Certainly we know some of the guys you got increase in salary but it
would be difficult to claim it since it is mostly confidential. We even know some people
have increase in salary every six months since my employer does some favours to them ( mostly are Germans )

3. We have to work on weekends and nights to finish the project due to high priority.When asked
about payment for weekend work they simply say take holidays since it is not written in your contract to
be payed for weekend and extra hours. Is there any law which protect the rights of a person ?

4.If you see your employer is doing some favour to certain person and you are neglect some how.
Is there any law which can be shown to the employer ?

I just want to know how the employee is protected by the law. I know companies puts some clauses
when we sign some contract is there anyway to go against it ?

I don´t want to fight with them in court since it makes the life more miserable. Anybody can
change the job if he or she is not comfortable with the current employer.

Best Regards,

"We have to work on weekends and nights to finish the project due to high priority"
First of all there is nothing called high priority project,when a project starts the time is calculated with the number of man hours and if you are made to work for more than 8hrs then you should be bold to say no.The biggest problem is most of the people just keep quite and ready to work on weekends or late night if they are paid few extra € and some have nothing to do at home on weekends so just want to be at office use Internet which makes others in the group also to work.
I never came across a single German who works after 1900 or on weekends and if they have to then they work from home.
I worked on many Projects and i know from morning till evening one do nothing much and the last hour you get a mail with high priority to finish something then we sit late night.I know you cannot ignore such mails but you can respond saying that you work from home and need VPN access and next day come to office late the number of hours you worked from home.