Air Atlantis workers were dismissed on 30 April 1993 and continue to fight in courts more than three decades later. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued a ruling on 8 September that reinforces the possibility of former workers receiving compensation from the Portuguese state for judicial errors. The day after the collective dismissal, TAP began operating part of Air Atlantis' flights, using four of the eight aircraft from the dissolved company, information the workers were unaware of when they accepted the compensation.
The former employees contested the dismissal and asked to be integrated into TAP, which was the main shareholder of Air Atlantis. In 2007, the Lisbon Labour Court ordered TAP to reintegrate them and compensate them, but in 2008 the Lisbon Court of Appeal altered that sentence. In 2009, the Supreme Court of Justice rejected the workers' appeal without consulting the CJEU on the interpretation of European rules, after which the employees proceeded with an action against the state for the damages arising from that decision.
The CJEU had already concluded in 2015 that there was a transfer of business and that the Supreme Court should have requested clarifications from the European court. In the new ruling, the CJEU identifies errors in the interpretation of European rules and considers that the failure to consult the European court constitutes a sufficiently serious violation to hold the state liable, although that verification now falls to Portuguese courts.
The European ruling also clarifies that receiving legal compensation for collective dismissal cannot deprive a worker, in a transfer of establishment covered by European directives, of the right to contest the dismissal and claim the protection afforded by those rules. The Portuguese court will now have to verify the gravity of the violation and the direct link between that violation and the damages claimed, without the European ruling setting amounts or establishing a date for any eventual payment.
