Workers in Spain who receive dismissal notices in July risk losing their right to challenge the decision in court, according to a labour lawyer who describes the practice as the most popular form of dismissal each summer.
Alejandro Llano, a labour law specialist, said the final two weeks of July see a striking rise in dismissal notices. He explained that while article 59.3 of the Workers’ Statute gives employees 20 working days to contest a dismissal, a separate rule creates a trap during the summer period.
Article 183 of the Organic Law on Judicial Power designates August as a non-working month for most court proceedings. However, article 43.2 of the Social Jurisdiction Law explicitly exempts dismissal cases, classifying them as urgent. This means that deadlines continue to run through August even as most workers are on holiday.
Llano said the rule, intended to protect workers by fast-tracking dismissal cases, instead works against them by treating August as a valid month for the clock to run down. Many employees wrongly assume that the judicial system shuts down in summer, he added.
The law firm Bermejo i Alegret confirmed the seasonal rise in dismissals, describing it as a quiet practice with a high legal cost. The firm warned that when an employer sends a dismissal notice knowing the worker is travelling or abroad, courts may treat that conduct as a sign of imbalance in the employment relationship, which could lead a judge to rule the dismissal null or improper.
Official data does not capture the full scale of the phenomenon. The Ministry of Labour recorded 4,864 workers affected by collective redundancies in July compared with 3,898 in June and 992 in September of the same year, but those figures cover only a small share of all dismissals. Individual dismissal statistics are published only annually, with 643,681 cases recorded in 2024 and no monthly breakdown, while court data on claims is released only by quarter.
