The Algarve’s Local Health Unit (ULS) has been ordered to pay out thousands of euros in back pay to hundreds of nurses, after losing a long-running legal battle at Portugal’s Supreme Court of Justice.
The case, involving around 300 nurses on individual employment contracts, centres on how career progression points were calculated and from which year they should apply. The ULS Algarve, in line with the Ministry of Health, had argued for years that the law only allows those points to be counted from 2022 onwards. That position has now been rejected by the country’s highest court.
The dispute dates back to 2017, when a hospital management team approved the counting of progression points and paid retroactive sums to around 30 nurses, applying them from 2018. A later administration tried to reverse that decision, but a group of nurses took the case to court and won at first instance.
According to Tiago Botelho, president of the ULS Algarve Board of Directors, the judges were clear that the payments could not be withdrawn once they had been granted.
“Since you had already formalised and paid these 30 people the progression points for that period, and we’re talking two or three years later, we are not going to allow you to go back on that decision for those workers,” he said, citing the court ruling.
Despite that initial defeat, the ULS continued to appeal. It later won at the Évora Court of Appeal, only for that decision to be overturned by the Supreme Court of Justice, which ruled against the health authority.
Botelho said the Supreme Court did not rule that retroactive payments should automatically apply from 2018, but rather that equal treatment must be guaranteed once the benefit had been given to some staff.
“What the Supreme Court has now said is not that the nurses were right and that back pay should go back to 2018, but that once it was applied to 30 workers, it had to be applied to the rest,” he explained.
He warned the ruling could have wider consequences well beyond the Algarve.
“Now nurses in Lisbon, Porto or Trás-os-Montes can come forward and say, ‘if the court ruled that equal work means equal pay in the Algarve, then we want the same.’ Yes, this could open a real Pandora’s box,” he said.
In the Algarve alone, the financial impact is substantial. The nurses involved in the case could each receive between €10,000 and €20,000 in back pay, adding up to several hundred thousand euros.
Botelho confirmed the ruling will be complied with but admitted it will weigh heavily on the organisation’s finances.
“We are now doing the calculations and will probably process the payments in March, but in the case of these workers we are talking about hundreds of thousands of euros,” he said, adding that the decision “represents yet another blow to the budget”.
He stressed that the money had not been planned for and that additional funding would have to be requested.
“We do not have this money allocated in the budget, obviously. We will pay because the court has ordered us to, and then, at some point, we will have to ask the ministry to reinforce the ULS budget to cover this cost,” he said.
For the nurses’ legal team, the ruling marks a turning point. According to their lawyer, David Mestre Leonardo, quoted by Lusa news agency, the decision represents “a decisive step” towards ending discrimination between nurses on individual employment contracts and those working under public service contracts.
