What happened
At Foundever’s contact centres in Spain, staff have rest days allocated according to how many people the company needs working each day.
But when the union CGT asked how those decisions were being made, the company said it did not use algorithms.
It was reported that CGT took Foundever to Spain’s National Court (Audiencia Nacional) after the company failed to disclose the rules used to allocate rest days at its Barcelona, Madrid and Seville sites. Three other unions, CCOO, USO and CSIF, joined the claim.
According to the judgment, CGT’s union sections had asked about algorithms affecting staff, including the allocation of rest days. On 15 July 2024, Foundever replied: “We do not use algorithms or automated decision systems, still less artificial intelligence.”
What an auditable version would have shown
The court found that Foundever was using an algorithm to decide when employees could take their rest days.
The system worked by taking the company’s forecast of how busy it expected to be, calculating how many staff were needed each day and using a mathematical formula to distribute rest days.
Under Article 64.4.d of Spain’s Workers’ Statute, works councils have the right to know the rules, parameters and instructions behind algorithms that affect working conditions.
The court found that Foundever had withheld this information from CGT and, in doing so, breached the union’s freedom of association.
Where the gap was
The court declared the company’s conduct void. It ordered Foundever to immediately disclose the formula’s parameters, rules and instructions for its Barcelona, Madrid and Seville sites. The company was also ordered to pay CGT 6,250 euros in damages.
The judgment was dated 4 July 2025 and became public in December 2025, when the union announced the outcome.
A ConductRecord keeps, for each rest day assigned, the forecast used, the rule applied and the result, so worker representatives can see how the formula works.
A MetricRecord is designed to produce signed figures, such as how rest days were spread across staff, that a works council or court can verify.
ConductRecord and MetricRecord are Headlights designs.
What governance should have looked like
The judgment could be appealed to the Supreme Court. As of 4 October 2026, the sources reviewed showed no appeal decision.
When a company uses a formula to decide when employees work and when they rest, best practice would be to explain how those decisions are made, share the rules with worker representatives and keep records showing how rest days were allocated.
Failure Pattern: according to Spain’s National Court, an employer allocated staff rest days with a formula-based tool while telling the union it used no algorithms, and withheld the formula from worker representatives.
Governance Principle: an employer that uses an automated formula to set working conditions should say so and give worker representatives its rules when they ask.
The reference implementation of ConductRecord and MetricRecord is open source. It lives at github.com/saffronandindia/headlights-oss, Apache 2.0 licensed and free to install. The repository is public now.
Sources
- Audiencia Nacional, Sala de lo Social, Sentencia 101/2025, ECLI:ES:AN:2025:2867 (4 July 2025), full text (Iberley)
- CGT logra la primera sentencia de la AN sobre el derecho de información de algoritmos en el sector del contact center (CGT, December 2025)