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Travelling to work 'is work', European court rules
- Retra 11y agoMakes sense; nobody is going to tell you it's not your job to get somewhere you are being payed to be.
- verelo 11y agoBut...is it the employers issue if you choose to work 4 hours away from where you live? Are they allowed to not employ people based on where they live as it is going to impact their costs? I like the idea, but i get the feeling the implementation will result in no major benefit for anyone. Edit: I'm an idiot and i understand now :-)
- ropiku 11y agoThis is only if there is no fixed office, if they had an office they this would not matter and would be the employees issue. Obviously the travel time from the office to the client is during work time.
- nevdka 11y agoWhat if you're a sales rep working out of your car (so no fixed office). Your region is London, but you live in (checks google maps...) Manchester. Your first sales appointment is always going to be 250km away. Should traveling that 250km count as work?
- kuschku 11y agoYes, this is what this law case was about: Only the first and last appointment on a day.
- lmm 11y agoThe company can solve that by having a London office, and then your time to and from that London office isn't work, but between there and anywhere else is. I think the spirit is that the employee should know where they're supposed to be working from and be able to choose where to live based on that.
- Symbiote 11y agoYour contract would define a usual place of work, but if that is London then the company would have to pay your time to come into the office in Manchester. (I think. I'vec not had a job like this.)
- dagw 11y agoIf the company is insisting on sending a rep. from Manchester down to London then absolutely.
- nevdka 11y agoSure, a rep whose normal region is Manchester should be able to claim an extra commute to London as time worked. I was thinking more that the rep was hired as a London rep, but chooses to live in Manchester. So the rep is abusing the rules to work fewer hours, and coding his startup/watching Netflix on the commute.
- dagw 11y agoI think that problem would end up 'solving' itself when that sales rep ends up making 1-2 sales call in the time it takes colleagues to make 10-12 and the company firing him for gross inefficiency.
- InclinedPlane 11y agoThis isn't about this. This is about people where travel is some part of their job. If your employer says you have to be 20 miles north of town at 8 am and 30 miles south of town at another appointment starting at 2pm, they can't pretend that driving those 50 miles in between shouldn't be on the clock. For ordinary folks who have a fixed workplace every day this ruling has zero impact.
- verelo 11y agoRight! OK that makes a lot of sense. Thank you I don't know why I didn't get that right away.
- thesimon 11y ago"The ruling came about because of [...] a company which [...] installs security systems. The company shut its regional offices down in 2011, resulting in employees travelling varying distances before arriving at their first appointment." (Using US examples in the following, because probably the majority of the readers understand it better than European cities, even though it does not apply to the US). Say you are living in NYC where your company is based. Every day you get an email telling you where you have to install a new security system. One day it might be Brooklyn, one day it might be Washinton D.C, because everything is being managed from the central NYC office. Why exactly should traveling to and between the appointment (say Newark in the morning, Bronx in the evening) not be considered work? The employee is not living 4 hours away from the first appointment because he wants to own a bigger house, but because his employer has told him to work there.
- owen_griffiths 11y agoThat example makes sense, but if you want to impose a rule you have to worry about the cases where it doesn't make sense. What about a plumbing business which dispatches jobs within a 5 mile radius. If the employee moves 2 hours away, suddenly the company has to pay 4 hours a day of commuting. The net result of this could easily be workers being required to travel to and from a central location as a workaround, when they could have better outcomes travelling straight from home - hurting the people you are supposedly want to help.
- salvadors 11y ago> What about a plumbing business which dispatches jobs within a 5 mile radius. If the employee moves 2 hours away, suddenly the company has to pay 4 hours a day of commuting. As you say, if the company has a fixed office at the centre of that radius, they can still tell the worker that their days begin when they arrive at the office, and then the 'worktime' begins once they get there, ready to travel out to the first customer. That's how many businesses operate anyway — and how the business at the centre of this case used to work. The case was brought once they closed that office down.
- ascagnel_ 11y ago
- burger_moon 11y agoI realize working in the tech industry we are not exposed to the real issues that resulted in this, but prior to my work in this field, I worked in the energy industry. We worked on the road travelling to different job sites. Our employer would put us up in a hotel and we would drive to the job site. Some big jobs had 'man camps' on site so you didn't have to worry about this, but often we would be an hour or more from the job site and commute everyday. We didn't get to decide where we lived. In one instance my hotel was in one country and my work site in another. We spent an hour just dealing with border control each way, every day. Now I am US citizen so this doesn't help me any but this is a global job and the same circumstances exist in Europe as they do here for working field service jobs. I gave just one small example, but think about all the plumbers, HVAC, electricians, construction workers, highway crews, that all have to travel to the job site. Their employer bids on jobs that are often very far from their homes and the shop. It really sucks having to bust ass for 12 hours a day and have an hour or more commute back home, or back to the shop everyday after work. It sucks even more that it's unpaid, but until now people just had to accept as being a norm. I'm certain there will need to be adjustments in labor rate/job bids to accommodate this, but the hopeful in me is that it's worth it. edit: sorry I saw your edit after I posted.
- Cthulhu_ 11y ago> Are they allowed to not employ people based on where they live as it is going to impact their costs? Yup, I'd say so. It's up to an employer to decide whether someone's good enough to be worth paying their travel expenses. In my company's case, traveling expenses are about a quarter of people's wages (or maybe that's just me). Lease cars and such. We've had colleagues that had a two hour commute here, who stayed with the company not because they liked the commute, but because they liked the company and the company paid for their travel expenses. In higher-end IT, people are worth their weight in gold, and one has to do anything to get and keep them.
- lfowles 11y ago> Time spent travelling to and from first and last appointments by workers without a fixed office should be regarded as working time, the European Court of Justice has ruled Oh well.
- phowat 11y agoThankfully, because I wouldn't want to be discriminated against if I chose to live further away from work so I could afford a nicer, bigger place.
- robzyb 11y agoFun fact: In Japan most companies will pay for your public transport ticket. Never heard any suggestion of discrimination based on this though. Although time cost > public transport cost.
- phowat 11y agoHere in Brazil it's the same and I've heard plenty of stories of companies who wouldn't hire people if they cost more than X per day in transportation. Not for tech workers, but for unskilled jobs.
- IkmoIkmo 11y agoSame here in the Netherlands. For skilled labor it's generally a non-issue, for unskilled labor they'll often require you to live near or own a transport card already.
- studentrob 11y agoThe incentive to discriminate would be pretty high if employers were forced to pay per hour of missed work. Man hours are more expensive than travel costs
- kuschku 11y agoI’ve only seen this for students of universities and all kinds of schools here in Europe. Although school students only get a ticket for their way from school to home, and university students get a ticket that allows them to get anywhere in their region for free.
- wavefunction 11y agoHopefully this puts more interest among executives and managers towards distributed/remote teams.
- mhurron 11y agoKnow how I know you didn't read the article?
- wavefunction 11y agoI read some of the article. Did you know that? I guess you signaled that you did not know that with your contentless comment.
- DanBC 11y agoI'm a bit confused how they claim this has no effect on UK minimum wage workers. If that travel time counts towards my 48 hours max working hours why doesn't it also count as time I should be paid for?
- fennecfoxen 11y agoIn programming terms: namespacing. You have a set of activities which people do. You have validations on those activities. To determine whether a working arrangement is legal, all validations must pass. The UK has one set of validations. The EU has another. Some of them check the same things. Both the EU and UK validations make use of abstractions. One of these abstractions they reference is a particular symbol named 'work'. However, the symbol for 'work' is not defined in a common namespace or dictionary, but is instead private to each ruleset. Therefore if the EU court rules that 'work' must be defined a certain way for the purposes of EU regulations, it does not affect the UK regulations. If you think that's at all confusing wait until you hear about the government of the city of London. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1ROpIKZe-c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1ROpIKZe-c
- digi_owl 11y agothat video kinda reminded me of the enclaves exclaves one. BTW, The City even has its own police force afaik. It really is a strange place...
- toyg 11y agoPeople can claim all they want, until a UK employee sues his employer in European courts and wins, and then they can't. This affects any worker who does not work in a fixed place and is otherwise forced to attend appointments, regardless of pay grade.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y agoAre you sure it applies to Salleried roles?
- D_Alex 11y agoSo... for some people, the work day now starts as soon as they leave the house. Now those with a "fixed office" can feel they are being hard done by... I have a feeling we started sliding down a slippery slope here.
- scrollaway 11y agoYour own life has not gotten worse just become someone else's life has become better. There are other comments explaining why this is a needed law. I'll let you read them.
- Frozenlock 11y agoI wonder if Europeans see the vicious circle they are in. Step 1: More job regulations. Step 2: Employees cost more and are harder to get rid of; Businesses less inclined to hire. Step 3: Jobs are hard to get, so employees ask for more security from the government. Repeat.
- Animats 11y agoLike Germany, unemployment rate 4.7% and strong job protections?
- Frozenlock 11y agoNo, more like all the countries that aren't Germany. Or do you think it's a breeze seeking a job in France (unemployment ~10%), Italy (unemployment ~13%), Spain (unemployment ~20%), Greece (unemployment ~25%)... There's many others if you want to take a look. http://www.statista.com/statistics/268830/unemployment-rate-in-eu-countries/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/268830/unemployment-rate-...
- scrollaway 11y agoUnemployment rates in those countries has nothing to do with EU regulations, and a lot more to do with the local taxes and country's stability.
- Frozenlock 11y agoOf course; I was answering the user who made a snarky comment using a single handpicked data point. I did not say it was caused by EU regulations, just that Europeans (which include local governments) are in a vicious circle.
- ionised 11y agoYou're implying they are in a vicious circle because of these regulations.
- supriyarao 11y agoWould love to see this implemented in Bangalore! With the traffic jams, one could get paid for just leaving home to get to work
- xwat 11y agoHaha yeah, then you would see how fast would corporations allow working remotely (if the nature of the work makes it possible).
- century19 11y agoI guess this should also apply to work trips then? I knew one guy who would only book a flight from 9am on Monday mornings, rather than being pressured into Sunday night or sillyAM Monday morning. When I told other people who travel for work abot this the response was pretty much that he should be fired.
- jasonkester 11y agoSad, but this seems to be hardwired in to human nature. See also 6am-3pm, 10am-7pm, "four tens", telecommuting, unpaid leave to supplement vacation, and other things employees do to improve their own quality of life without harming anybody else. There's a dominant personality type that, when it sees somebody getting something nice seeks to tear them back down. The concept of "what a great idea. I could do that too" never breaks into conscious thought. Only rage and the desire to bring the offender back to the status quo. Ideally with punishment.
- century19 11y ago-- Ideally with punishment Yes, or shame. "It will look like you aren't a hard worker."
- Symbiote 11y agoAt my last job, travel time was added to my timesheet. A (rare!) transcontinental flight tended to give me an extra day off. This was a public sector job in the UK.
- rwmj 11y agoRightly so too. I always take time off to compensate for time spent travelling for work. I don't know why anyone would think this is unusual.
- rockdoe 11y agoIt's already the law in France (no business travel in weekends), exactly to protect workers against situations like that.
- rockdoe 11y agoDoes this apply to consultants going to a customer (where they may be for a longer period of time)?
- Cthulhu_ 11y agoI've been wondering that, since I'm in the same situation. But, in my personal situation, our contracts are generally for longer terms, so I guess it is a fixed office - and we have a fixed HQ too. Which we don't generally visit during our workdays though. Even if it would apply to consultants though, I doubt anything would change. Right now there's already laws in place here (NL), or just a company agreement, about longer commutes, iirc any commute longer than an hour can be written down as working hours.
- rockdoe 11y agoBut, in my personal situation, our contracts are generally for longer terms, so I guess it is a fixed office - and we have a fixed HQ too. The issue is that you have no control over the location of these changing "fixed" offices, so your employer is free to assign you to a customer halfway across the country. Sounds exactly like the kind of situation this ruling is supposed to protect against.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y agoI suspect not as I woudl imagine that Managerial and Professional jobs are excluded
- dnautics 11y agoIANAL, but in the US, if you are a consultant going to a customer, whether or not that is billable is up to your contract. Either way, you definitely CAN claim travel expenses during that period for tax purposes.
- cjg 11y agoIt may well do. HMRC has guidelines about how long you have to work at a customer site before it is considered to be a fixed site like this. They have to do this because it informs tax decisions about travel expense claims. I think the guideline is that after two years, the site should then not be eligible for travel expenses. Nearby sites are also not eligible - where the definition of nearby relates to how similar are the journeys taken to reach each site. Whilst HMRC clearly aren't the branch of government that are involved in this ruling, this is a similar structure around which such an argument could be made.
- bullen 11y agoNo, travelling to a work today is just stupid, work from home!
- roel_v 11y agoThe article's headline is not in line with the ruling of course, but it's not even what most people in this thread are assuming. The ECJ's rulings are to be interpreted very narrowly. In this specific circumstance, the company closed an office after which people had longer commutes. So this ruling in no shape or form means that people who took a job with a certain commute now all of a sudden will be paid for that commute! It's only the people where, through the choice of the employer, the commute has become longer, who can use this as a precedent. Precedent case facts matter a lot!
- DanBC 11y agoDoesn't this apply to eg care workers who visit clients in the client's home where the care worker's employer doesn't have a central office? The closing of the office is an unimportant detail of this particular case. I haven't seen anything else that interprets this case as narrowly as you do.
- anu_gupta 11y agoFrom the linked article: "The court ruling said: "The fact that the workers begin and finish the journeys at their homes stems directly from the decision of their employer to abolish the regional offices and not from the desire of the workers themselves." So, the closure of the office seems to be highly relevant.
- roel_v 11y ago"The closing of the office is an unimportant detail of this particular case." Says who? All precedent is to be interpreted narrowly in scope wrt to the facts, and that's not even taking into account that judge-made law as a concept is, in general, foreign to most EU jurisdictions (with the UK being the most notable exception). While there is not much dispute over the primacy of the ECJ over national law (although de jure this is not even a given!), there is no reason to assume that broad, general doctrines laid out by the ECJ all of a sudden constitute new law in the members of the Treaty (I mean, I'm not even talking about the ECJ-equivalent of a 'van Gend en Loos' ruling, I'm just talking about de factor interpretation by member state judiciaries and administrations). Furthermore I'm a bit perplexed at how easily you seem to dismiss the closing of the office, which is absolutely material to this case. It's quite different when a unilateral decision of a party affects the counter party, or if both parties knew what they got into from the start! Also, or maybe 'especially', in employment cases. Please tell what you base your assertion on, because it's in direct contradiction with all literature and practice. (and yes, I do have a law degree, although it's been a few years since I last studied any EU law, so I'm not claiming to be an expert here).
- furyg3 11y agoIn the US, I worked for a consulting group in the bay area (Fremont). There was a big discussion about whether or not we were on the clock while driving to client sites, because some people wanted to live in Tracy and other people closer to the office, and the client sites were all over the place. So how to calculate this? One way to do it was just to say you have to show up to the the Fremont office before going anywhere ('fixed office'), but this can be wasteful for everyone, since the client site can be in the opposite direction of the office. The final agreement was that the time it would have taken you to get to/from the office was your own time, and from then on you're on the clock and paid. So if you live next to the office and get sent somewhere, your whole commute time to that place is paid. If you want to live in Tracy and drive an hour into work, that's ok, but your commute to the client site is only paid if it's longer than an hour or so. If you had to go to two client sites in a single day, the time between the client sites was always paid. Nobody really had any idea if this was legal or not, but all of the consultants agreed it was very fair.
- brixon 11y agoThat sounds very reasonable. That leaves the power in the hands of the employee and makes it very simple for the employer.
- alistairSH 11y agoMy wife's current employer handles it this way. And it does seem like a fair compromise for cases of occasional semi-local travel (in her case, a remote office that's 50 miles from home and visited monthly, vs. her usual 12 mile commute). Her previous employer didn't count any commuting to client sites as "on the clock". One of many reasons she left. Granted, this was a Beltway Bandit and all work was at client sites, but as contracts changed, her commute changed dramatically (not just within the city, but as much as 2 hours on the Interstate).
- itsdevlin 11y agoIIRC this is how the IRS recommends milage expenses are to be treated. The delta of your normal commute = work.
- unfamiliar 11y ago
- zhte415 11y agoTangential, but related to the headline: In China, if an employee has an accident on the way to work, the employer is required to provide care and compensation (not liability compensation, just regular employee compensation) just as if the accident had happened in the workplace. This ruling was made in 2013.
- forinti 11y agoSame thing in Brazil.
- xacaxulu 11y agoThe best thing about being a consultant and running your own business is that every expense or spent time around work is considered WORK. As a basic employee in the US, you never get these sort of benefits and write-offs. When I hear people commuting 1 hour to work, that means they work 50 hours a week (assuming a 40 hours at the office). Their hourly rate is effectively much lower.
- mtberatwork 11y agoNot necessarily, salaried employees have other benefits that the self-employed simply do not have, such as health care, retirement plans, bonuses, guaranteed income, etc. Furthermore salaried employees do not have to pay self-employment taxes, gross receipts taxes, property taxes, business insurance and the whole bucket load of expenses that businesses need to pay which effectively lowers the hourly-rate of the self-employed.
- pmiller2 11y agoThis, for sure. I have a 1 hour commute now. When I go looking for another job, the commute time will be factored into the salary number I'm willing to accept. Every 5 minutes I add to my commute on average constitutes 3.33 hours a month doing things I don't want to and wouldn't normally do (commuting). The way an employer gets me to do things I wouldn't normally be doing for them is to pay me more. It's simple. I don't like to drive and hate sitting in traffic, so if I can't reasonably take public transportation, they have to pay me more to drive, too. This has resulted in me flat out turning down interviews with companies I'd otherwise consider, and I'm ok with that.
- leovonl 11y agoClickbait title.
- jksmith 11y agoStart the autonomous car, let it send a "punch the clock" event to work. Status: 1) Remote 2) in office 3) working, in route? Additionally, only accept meetings when status is 3).
- bhc3 11y agoI'm convinced way down the road (ahem...pun) that autonomous vehicles are going to become our work spaces. We already see it with some people getting work done on their company buses. But those are limited in terms of letting you work fully. In our future, you'll have your own personal space on a self-driving car. Room for proper placement of your laptop + keyboard. Ability to loudly participate in conference calls. Dual screens. And this opens up home ownership possibilities. Bay Area home prices are going through the roof. If companies want to hire people, they need to account for housing prices. Well, why not hire people who live 2 hours away? For example, the job may be in San Francisco (median home price $1.063 million), but the employee lives in Roseville (media home price $372,200). The work day starts with the 8 am commute. Our employee lets the vehicle drive and starts working. Emails, documents, conference calls, etc. He then shows up in the office at 10 am. Gets that key face time and benefits from those serendipitous moments that only occur in person. Exits the office at 4:30 pm to return home, working on the commute. Has dinner with the kids and helps them with the homework. One can see real possibilities for positive change once we have autonomous vehicles.
- Raphmedia 11y agoI've been thinking about this a lot. I think that ultimately, a lot of offices are going to be replaced by virtual reality offices. This would cut our dependance on commuting.
- simonjgreen 11y agoThis is for people without fixed offices eg travelling salespeople etc. This is not saying your daily commute is work. The title of this submission is very misleading
- conceit 11y agoMy place of work is fixed, but it's not an office. So, does this apply to me? :)