Haarlem cafe ordered to pay chefs €2,000 each for firing them over private messages
The Noord-Holland District Court ordered a Haarlem café-restaurant to pay two former employees €2,000 in damages each because the company’s management snooped through their private messages, according to a recently published ruling.
The case concerns two young chefs who had been working for the Haarlem café, part of the Amsterdam hospitality company De Jaren, since late 2024. The two men are good friends and were hired by the restaurant to develop a new kitchen concept. The company fired the two chefs after reading messages to each other in which they were extremely critical of their colleagues.
According to the ruling, one of the chefs used a company laptop for his WhatsApp messages. A manager found the messages when using the laptop for work last June. She says the messages were still open, and she read them because she spotted her name. The manager went through the messages, took photos of them, and sent them to the owner of the restaurant.
The owner of the restaurant summoned the two chefs and agreed to meet with them the next day to discuss the matter. When the two chefs called in sick the next morning, the restaurant informed them that their temporary contract would not be renewed.
The two men took the matter to court. They did not want their jobs back, but did want €30,000 in damages for the invasion of their privacy. According to the former chefs, their private messages had not been open on the company laptop, and their employer was not allowed to view them.
The court ruled in the chefs’ favor. The subdistrict court ruled it “remains unclear” if the plaintiffs’ colleague “deliberately took action to gain access to the WhatsApp conversation between” the two plaintiffs. “However, it is without dispute that, after gaining access, she scrolled through the messages for a considerable period of time and actively searched the conversation. She subsequently took photographs of parts of the conversation without permission from or consultation with [them], and shared these images” with the others involved,” the verdict stated.
The judge explicitly called the messages “inappropriate,” but said that this is outweighed by the restaurant seriously overstepping its boundaries by reading employees’ private messages. The content of the conversations was also the reason why the plaintiffs’ contracts were not renewed.
Because the company acted “seriously culpably,” the court awarded the chefs compensation in addition to a standard transition payment. The court awarded the men each €2,000 in compensation plus €840.50 for legal costs. One also got €1,278 to assist in his transition to a new job. The compensation is considerably lower than the €30,000 they demanded.
According to the judge, the two men’s income loss was negligible as they both found new jobs by September. The compensation is for non-pecuniary damages. The court considers it plausible that the employer’s invasion of their privacy caused the chefs' “feelings of vulnerability, stress, and discomfort.” According to the court, the company also deserves a reprimand for not realizing the seriousness of invading the chefs’ privacy.
