24.11.2014   

EN

Official Journal of the European Union

C 421/20

1.

If temporary workers, whose contracts have been terminated on the lawful ground that those contracts are temporary, are to be regarded as falling outside the scope and protection of Directive 98/59 (1) on collective redundancies, by virtue of Article 1(2)(a) thereof (judgment on the request for a preliminary ruling in Case C-392/13 pending), would it be consistent with the purpose of the Directive if — conversely — such workers were taken into account for the purposes of determining the number of workers ‘normally’ employed at an establishment (or, in Spain, an undertaking) in order to calculate the numerical threshold for collective redundancies (10 % or 30 workers) laid down in Article 1(a)(i) of the Directive?

2.

The requirement under the second subparagraph of Article 1(1)(b) of Directive 98/59 that ‘terminations’ be ‘assimilated’ to ‘redundancies’ is made subject to the condition ‘that there [be] at least five redundancies’. Must that condition be interpreted as relating to the ‘redundancies’ previously effected or brought about by the employer, as provided for in Article 1(1)(a) of the Directive, and not to the minimum number of ‘assimilable terminations’ that must exist in order for such assimilation to take place?

3.

Does the concept of ‘terminations of an employment contract which occur on the employer’s initiative for one or more reasons not related to the individual workers concerned’, as referred to in the last subparagraph of Article 1(1) of Directive 98/59, cover the termination of a contract between the employer and the worker which, although initiated by the worker, comes about in response to a previous change in working conditions that was initiated by the employer on account of the critical difficulties being experienced by the undertaking and for which compensation is ultimately to be awarded in an amount equivalent to that payable for unfair dismissal?