The penalty schedule: degrees, caps, and the required procedure

The Labor Law fixes the penalties that may be imposed on an employee, being warning, fine, withholding or deferring an increment, and dismissal, each with its place in the escalation.

Article 67 provides that an employer may not impose on an employee a penalty not provided for in the law or in the work regulations, so a penalty with no basis in the regulations is void however reasonable it seemed.

In practice this means the regulations are the source of disciplinary authority, so what is not in them is not imposed, which makes reviewing the regulations before any disciplinary step unskippable.

Article 70 sets several constraints together: a fine for a single breach may not exceed five days' pay, more than one penalty may not be imposed for a single breach, no more than five days' pay may be deducted towards fines in a single month, suspension without pay may not exceed five days, and no penalty may be imposed for an act committed outside the workplace unless it is connected to the work, the employer, or the responsible manager.

The third constraint matters most in practice, because however many the breaches in a month, the total collected for them stays within five days' pay. Note that it constrains the collection, not the penalty: fines validly imposed remain due, and collection of whatever exceeds the limit is deferred to later months. The first constraint, by contrast, binds the penalty itself, so anything above five days' pay for a single breach is never imposed at all.

This cap covers fines alone; recovering pay for time not worked is not a fine but a withholding of pay for work that never happened, so it stays outside the calculation.

Article 69 sets two deadlines rather than one: an employee may not be charged with a breach discovered more than thirty days earlier, and a penalty may not be imposed more than thirty days after the investigation concluded and the breach was established against them.

The purpose of the restriction is to prevent old breaches being kept as leverage to be produced during a dispute, so the establishment either acts at the time or forfeits its right.

Documenting the breach immediately with its date is therefore what preserves the establishment's position, and relying on memory loses it.

Article 68 provides that a penalty may not be escalated on repetition where one hundred and eighty days have passed since the previous breach, counted from the date the employee was notified of the penalty imposed.

This means the repetition counter is not open across the whole period of service, so someone who erred once and then went six months without repeating is treated on the next occasion as a first-time offender.

It requires the establishment to keep the notification date of every penalty rather than the date the breach occurred, because the period runs from notification.

Article 71 provides that no disciplinary penalty may be imposed until the employee has been notified in writing of what is alleged, questioned, and their defence investigated, all recorded in minutes placed in their file; questioning may be oral for minor breaches where the penalty does not exceed a warning or a fine of one day's pay, provided that is recorded in the minutes.

The procedure here is a condition of validity rather than a formality worth observing, so a penalty imposed without an investigation is void even where the breach was established, and the establishment returns the amount deducted and possibly compensation.

The minutes should state the breach and its date, what the employee said, the establishment's decision, and the date of notification, because these are the elements any adjudicating body will later ask about.

The default in penalties is escalation, starting with a warning, then a fine, then something harsher, and a higher degree is not reached for unless the regulations provide it for that same breach.

Dismissal without gratuity is a separate category outside this escalation, confined to the Article 80 cases alone and on their conditions, including the opportunity to state reasons and dissolution within the prescribed period.

In absence cases specifically, prior written warning is required before dismissal, and an establishment that dismisses for absence without a documented warning leaves the dismissal liable to be set aside.

A disciplinary penalty rests on three documents: a clause in approved and posted regulations, documented investigation minutes containing the employee's defence, and a record proving the incident with its date and time.

When all three live in one system that links the attendance record to the breach to the penalty to the notification date, the establishment comes out of any challenge with ordered evidence; when they are scattered, it is left searching through messages and folders.