In accordance with article 37 of the Workers' Statute, the worker, with prior notice and justification, may be absent from work, with the right to remuneration, for 5 days for hospitalization or surgical intervention without hospitalization that requires home restof the spouse, de facto partner or relatives up to the second degree, including the blood relative of the de facto partner, as well as any other person other than the above, who lives with the working person in the same home and who requires effective care of that person.

What does the Workers' Statute (ET) say about paid leave for hospitalization?
Article 37.3.b) of the ET establishes that the worker, with prior notice and justification, may be absent from work, with the right to remuneration, for a period of 5 days (before 06-30-2023 This period was 2 days, which was extended to 4 days when the worker needed to travel for this purpose) due to a serious accident or illness, hospitalization or surgical intervention without hospitalization requiring home rest for the spouse, de facto partner or relatives. up to the second degree by consanguinity or affinity, including the blood relative of the de facto couple, as well as any other person other than the above, who lives with the worker in the same home and who requires effective care of the worker.

Time of enjoyment: calendar or business days?
The Workers Statute (article 37.3) does not specify for permits whether they are working or calendar days, simply mentioning "days". In the case of the marriage permit, it does specify that it is 15 calendar days. Since the legal norm does not develop this concept, the next thing we must do is look at how our collective agreement regulates it.
And in this way, some agreements regulate each permit, indicating whether they are working or calendar days. But controversies arise about whether this conventional regulation is in accordance with legal regulation or judicial interpretation.
In this regard, it must be taken into account that jurisprudence firmly establishes that paid leave must be taken on workdays instead of calendar days.

Jurisprudence of the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court in different Judgments (for example from 10/18/2020, 07/11/2023 or that of 10/03/2023 ), points out that in short paid leaves (not marriage leave) the days are working days and not calendar days, and the reason for this response is argued by the Supreme Court in the fact that the permit only makes sense if it refers to working days, since they are finalist permits, that is, they have the purpose of allowing the worker to travel due to the existence of an illness or hospitalization of a family member, The TS points out that the permit only makes sense if it refers to days in which the worker has to work (hence it refers to working days) since if on the day in question the worker does not have to work, he would have no finalist sense of the aforementioned permission.
At the same time, this reasoning is what leads the Supreme Court to affirm that the permit begins on the worker's first working day, since, if the event that causes the permit occurred or began in holiday, it also makes no sense to start taking paid leave on that holiday, so the leave will begin on that first working day.
The Supreme Court determines that the enjoyment of paid leave begins to be counted on the first working day after the causative event.

CJEU jurisprudence
For the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), paid leave is subject to two requirements: that one of the events considered in the regulations take place, on the one hand, and the fact of that the needs and obligations that justify the granting of paid leave occur during a work period, on the other hand. The Court of the Union understands that they cannot be claimed during a period of weekly rest or paid annual leave.

Collective agreements
In the specific case in which the collective agreement makes explicit that leave of this nature will be enjoyed on calendar days, the Supreme Court, in rulings from 2020, recalled that the regulation in collective agreements of paid leaves can only be an improvement of the regime included in art. 37 of the Workers' Statute.
Therefore, in this case two situations can occur:

• That the agreement does not improve what is established by the ET: the permits must be enjoyed from the working day on which the worker must stop going to work. This interpretation is in line with the doctrine of the Court of Justice of the European Union, which also considers that needs arise if that event occurs during a work period.


• If the collective agreement improves the legal catalog of permits: it will be what is determined in the conventional text. Thus, different starting days for each leave can be distinguished if the conventional rule clearly differentiates between calendar days and working days.