MK v Lufthansa CityLine GmbH

In its preliminary ruling, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) held that national rules which require a part-time worker to complete the same number of working hours as a full-time worker in order to receive additional remuneration constitute discrimination which is prohibited under EU law (namely Directive 97/81/EC concerning the Framework Agreement on part-time work concluded by UNICE, CEEP and the ETUC), unless such treatment is justified on objective grounds.

The facts of the case concern the working time of pilots, and specifically national legislation which makes the payment of additional remuneration for part-time workers and for comparable full-time workers uniformly contingent on the same number of working hours being exceeded in a given activity, such as a pilot’s flight duty. This means that a part-time pilot must complete the same number of flying duty hours as a full-time pilot to be entitled to that remuneration, without that threshold being lowered in a manner proportionate to the length of his or her individual working time. Under those circumstances, part-time pilots do not reach the trigger thresholds required to be entitled to additional remuneration, or are much less likely to do so than full-time pilots.

The CJEU held that since part-time workers thus satisfy much more rarely the conditions for entitlement to additional remuneration, a part-time pilot, such as the applicant in the main proceedings, must be regarded as subject to a difference in treatment compared with comparable full-time pilots, prohibited by Clause 4.1 of the Framework Agreement, unless it is justified on ‘objective grounds’ within the meaning of that clause, and that this treatment must be regarded as "less favourable" [paras 49, 50].

The CJEU further held that Clauses 4.1 and 4.2 of the Framework Agreement must be interpreted as precluding national legislation which makes the payment of additional remuneration for part-time workers and comparable full-time workers uniformly contingent on the same number of working hours being exceeded in a given activity, such as a pilot’s flight duty, in order to compensate for a workload particular to that activity [para. 67].