Posted on Sep 11, 2015 by Hannah Roche | 0 Comments
Employers who employ workers who have to travel to appointments throughout the day will now need to take account of a new ruling of the European Court of Justice, made on 10th September 2015.
The case, Federacion de Servicios Privados del sindicato Comisiones Obreras v Tyco Integrated Security SL and another (c-266/14), involves a Spanish-based company whose technician workers travel in company vehicles to appointments across Spain.
The company does not treat the workers’ first journey, from their home to their first appointment or their journey home (from their last appointment to their home) as “working time” under the Working Time Directive and instead treats it as “rest time”. Following a claim by the technicians to the Spanish Courts, who referred it to the ECJ, it has now been declared that for workers without a fixed base, time spent travelling from and to their home at the beginning and end of each day constitutes “working time”.
This means that UK employers will have to start treating such travel time as working time. This creates a number of difficult legal and commercial issues for employers:
The ECJ is ruling is likely to have a significant impact on businesses which rely on mobile workers such as the care sector, sales and field engineers. Such employers should now review their working practices and employee contracts to see if anything needs to change and whether the impact of the new ruling can be mitigated.
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