It is not possible to fire the worker who is usually late, if she/he was never warned previously

Picture this: you have been showing up late to work for two years. Your employer never says a word about it, never warns you, never disciplines you. Then one day, out of nowhere, you are handed a dismissal letter over exactly that lateness. Can the company do that? According to a recent Spanish court ruling, the answer is no.

The Social Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of Asturias confirmed, in a judgment dated July 28th, that a dismissal was unjustified in exactly this kind of case. The worker involved had been late "almost daily" for two years.

The court's reasoning centered on the size of the workplace. Because the clinic in question had a very small staff, the employer was clearly in a position to know about the worker's lateness the whole time. Despite that, the company tolerated it for a long period, and at no point before the dismissal letter arrived did it make clear to the worker that the lateness was a problem.

In the court's own words, firing her was "an unexpected reaction and disconnected from the tolerant attitude, at least passive, that it had maintained until then." The judges pointed out that this pattern was itself strong evidence that the company had never actually considered the lateness a serious issue. Given that history, dismissal was "an excessive response."

In other words, the company jumped straight from years of tolerating the behavior to ending the contract entirely, without ever going through the normal earlier steps, such as a warning or a sanction for minor or serious misconduct. On top of that, the court noted the company could not point to any specific harm the lateness had caused, either to the clinic itself or to other employees.

What this means for you

If you are an employer, this case is a reminder that tolerating a problem for a long time without ever raising it can seriously weaken your ability to dismiss someone over that same problem later. If you are an employee who was let go for something your employer knew about and never flagged, this ruling shows that Spanish courts take that history seriously, and a sudden dismissal without prior warning can be found unjustified.