Collective agreements: the case of the seniority bonus in railway catering
An employee performed the duties of “internal trainer”, executive status, within a railway catering company. She had seized the prud'hommes of requests for back pay. Its request related in particular to reminders of conventional minima. Concretely, the employee considered that the employer should have excluded her seniority bonus from the remuneration to be compared with the contractual minimum due to her.
In this case, it was the collective agreement for railway catering that applied.
On the one hand, its article 8-1 relating to the calculation of the conventional minima which indicates:
« The amount of salaries (..) is determined by applying to the number of “points”, (…), the value of the “point” determined during the annual salary negotiations, carried out in each company.
The amount thus obtained represents the gross monthly base salary of reference, to which are added, to obtain the actual gross monthly salary, the bonuses, allowances, allowances, participation in the results, reimbursement of expenses, benefits in kind, etc., provided for by the remuneration systems specific to each company and possibly finalized during the annual salary negotiations.
It is this real gross monthly salary that should be taken into account
