Employers may impose different penalties on employees who have committed the same offence, in the interests of the company.

In other words, imposing different penalties on employees does not, per se, constitute discrimination within the meaning of the law. The employer may even decide not to sanction all the employees at fault, but only some of them.

In this case, three employees of an association were punished for belatedly revealing incidents of sexual abuse of minors that had occurred within a family cared for by the association. Two employees were dismissed for serious misconduct, while the third received a warning. The lighter sanction was justified because the employee had not been working with the family in question for several years and could not have been aware of the most recent events.

Cass. soc., 17 September 2025, no. 23-22.456