At the facilities of the University Institute for Research into Sustainable Aquaculture and Marine Ecosystems (IU-ECOAQUA), located in Taliarte, scientific research has collided head-on with labor law. The Labor Division of the High Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) has issued an appeal ruling condemning the Canary Islands Science and Technology Park Foundation of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) for applying unequal and unjustified pay to one of its technical employees compared with other staff members holding the same qualifications and working the same hours.
The ruling by the regional court, issued by rapporteur María Jesús García Hernández alongside judges Glòria Poyatos Matas and Óscar González Prieto, partially overturns the earlier judgment handed down by Labor Court No. 5 of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The court rejected the university foundation’s defense and ordered it to immediately pay the outstanding salary differences, while imposing a legal obligation to permanently align the claimant’s salary with the pay scale for the administration area established in the collective agreement.
The claimant, who won the case, had been working since April 2013 as an Aquaculture Operations Technician, performing operational and maintenance duties in the aquaculture facility of the Aquaculture Research Group (GIA). Despite holding a Higher Vocational Training qualification—classified as MECES Level 1 and Functional Group IV for Technical Staff Supporting Projects—the organization paid him a gross annual salary of €11,956.21.
This salary was significantly lower than the €15,500 annual salary set out in the collective agreement for Specialist Administration Technician positions (Functional Group I).
The Transparency Portal exposes the pay gap
The key to the organization’s defeat in court was not a simple abstract comparison with administrative staff, but rather the institution’s own published job offers.
During the proceedings, the employee submitted official calls for applications for positions advertised between 2019 and 2023, obtained from the Transparency Portal, for specialist technicians in drafting, environmental chemistry, histology and aquaculture itself. In those offers, the foundation set a gross annual salary of €15,500 (€1,291.67 per month), applying the administrative area’s pay scale to technical positions.
In response to this evidence, the Canary Islands Science and Technology Park Foundation of the ULPGC based its defense on the argument that the division into functional groups justified the differences in pay and that the areas did not involve identical duties. However, the TSJC dismantled this position after finding that the public employer was unable to provide an objective and reasonable justification for paying some project-support technicians according to the higher scale while keeping others on the lower pay table.
Correcting the inconsistency
The ruling also corrects the error made by the court of first instance, which had initially dismissed the salary claim after confusing the subject of the dispute with an earlier case concerning variable position-related allowances. The court held that the lower court’s judgment contained a clear omission-based inconsistency and ruled directly on the merits to avoid delays, fully upholding the labor claim.
The financial penalty requires the Science and Technology Park Foundation to pay the worker €777.95 in arrears for salary differences accrued between January 1, 2022, and September 30, 2023. The ruling also orders the organization to pay €2,304 in arrears for accrued seniority during the same period, recognizing the employee’s right to receive a fixed €109.71 per month for this item.
The ruling sets a direct precedent for human resources management in R&D&I projects in the Canary Islands. By establishing that assignment to research projects does not justify the discretionary setting of lower salaries, the Canary Islands’ highest court is requiring public university foundations to align the pay of their technical staff with the general framework of the collective agreement, regardless of the source of funding.
The article “Blue economy ruling: Las Palmas’ IU-ECOAQUA is also a laboratory for the gender pay gap” was first published on canarymaritime.com.
