another x-mas salary question

Let's say an employee makes 25,000 Pesos/month working the full year in a Dominican company. How much christmas bonus does he get?

I checked the 'codigo de trabajo', Art. 219 says that the max x-mas salary is 1/12 of his monthly salary times the months he worked in this year (in this case 12), but the x-mas salary also should not be higher than 5 times the minumum wage - which is something about 3000 Pesos/month (?)- so he would get a max. of 15.000 Pesos?

However, when I go to http://www.set.gov.do/main/calculo.htm to calculate the 'prestationes' with a monthly salary of 25,000 Pesos I get the result for 'salario de navidad' of one full monthly salary = 25,000 Pesos.

What is legally correct?
Thanks in advance for your replies!

quaqualita

thanks for your replies.
Unfortunately my employer is breaking the custom this year, he pays us only 5 times min. wage. The years before we allways did receive a full monthly salary as a xmas bonus, it's quite disappointing not to receive it this year.
But I guess there is nothing I can do...

quaqualita

the company I work for did very good this year, but there is this silly 2nd paragraph of Art. 219 of the labor code:

Sin embargo, en ning?n caso el salario de Navidad ser? mayor del monto de cinco salarios m?nimos
legalmente establecido.

that's what my employer takes as the reason, that he won't pay us the full month salary as xmas salary this year.

I had never heard about this before either.

quaqualita

thanks for your reply Fabio.
Yes, there is an existence of a precedent ("costumbre"), our employer did not cap the Xmas salary the years before, we allways received a full month extra salary.

But our employer claims now, that last years he followed the same rule of 5 times the minimum salary and the only difference was that a we received extra money above this rule as a ?special bonus?. We should have nothing to complain about this year ,we should just be thankfull for getting an extra bonus the last years.
I have no records exept maybe the bank records from the last years, so it would be very hard to proof, if this payment was called xmas salary or special bonus (which it was not).

If legally correct or not, I think it was not a nice thing to do, my employer thinks there is nothing complain about. For the sake of all the other employees I stopped to discuss this issue with him, he already started to make life more difficult for us and stopped offering other benefits we used to get.

Life has to go on...

quaqualita