Travelling to work is also work, rules European court
Kounteya Sinha
London
A landmark judgement by the European Court of Justice (ECJ), which also binds Britain, has said that a time a person takes to travel to work and to return home will have to be counted as working time under the law.
Till now, the time employees clocked into the office and left it physically was considered the official time they devoted to work. The ruling revolves around a legal case in Spain involving Tyco, a security systems company which involves installing and maintaining antitheft security systems. In 2011 Tyco closed its offices in the provinces and assigned all its employees to the central office in Madrid. In some cases now, wor kers have to drive over three hours covering 100 kms to reach their client's homes. Tyco counts the time spent travelling between home and customers not as working time, but as a rest period. ECJ ruled that workers without a fixed office should be able to charge for the time such journeys last.
The Court said, “ Not taking those journeys into account would enable Tyco to claim that only the time spent carrying out the activity of installing and maintaining the security systems falls within the concept of working time, which would distort that concept and jeopardise the objective of protecting the safety and health of workers“.
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