Travelling to work 'is work', European court rules

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-34210002

by wj • 11 years ago

232 136 11 years ago

Retra• 11 years ago

Makes sense; nobody is going to tell you it's not your job to get somewhere you are being payed to be.

verelo2• 11 years ago

But...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• 11 years ago

This 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.

InclinedPlane• 11 years ago

This 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.

thesimon• 11 years 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.

burger_moon• 11 years ago

I 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_5• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

phowat2• 11 years ago

Thankfully, 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• 11 years ago

Fun 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.

samoli• 11 years ago

The ruling only applies to workers who are being sent to appointments, rather than working from a fixed office. E.g. sales reps, care workers. From the article:

"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."

This seems fair to me. I know people who are regularly leaving home at 5am to make their first appointment at 9am just so their employer can avoid paying them overtime.

Cthulhu_5• 11 years ago

At the cost of higher travel expenses to anywhere, though. I've been looking into the housing market lately; right now I live in a rental house close to a train station, my commute is about an hour. For the same price I can get a nice three bedroom house in a town somewhere, but it would be further away from anything - ergo, more travel expenses.

Cthulhu_5• 11 years ago

spacecowboy_lon4• 11 years ago

Its only for Blue collar hourly paid employees like Telecoms Engineers (Linemen).

M&P Salaried staff will be unaffected.

humanrebar• 11 years ago

On the other hand, there are many minimum wage jobs, at least in the U.S., where living close to work is completely out of the question financially. So there's an implicit 2+ hour unpaid daily commute required to have that job.

I'm not sure how to give affluent people the freedom to exchange commute times for lifestyle choices without forcing the same lifestyle choices on the less privileged.

hughes• 11 years ago

Pretty misleading headline.

baby• 11 years ago

It's written "traveling" to work, not "commuting" though.

rtcoms• 11 years ago

What do they mean by "without a fixed office" ?

Turing_Machine• 11 years ago

I assume outside sales, plumbers, tow-truck drivers, or anything else where the work is done at customer premises, or at some random location away from the company headquarters.

toyg3• 11 years ago

This particular ruling was against a company that closed all their regional offices and forced people to work with customers on-site all the time.

DanBC3• 11 years ago

Care workers who travel to people's homes.

ZeroGravitas• 11 years ago

It's a rule of headlines, similar to Betteridge's, but more specific: If a UK newspaper headline claims that the EU has done something crazy, reading the story will reveal that they haven't.

Decades of clickbait headlines may catch up on us soon as people get to vote on whether to leave the EU and they'll be basing their choice partly on headlines roughly of the form "EU rules say Queen to be replaced by an unelected German".

dredmorbius• 11 years ago

But the Queen is an unelected German.

Frqy3• 11 years ago

First time an employee goes to claim this, they will be allocated to a fixed office and required to attend there before heading out to appointments.

levosmetalo• 11 years ago

Which would be fine for the employee, since then he would spend like 30 minutes of his own time to come to the office, and then additional 2 hours of paid company time while traveling to the client. Before his regulations, the employee would need to spend 2 hours of his own time while going to the client without ever being reimbursed.

wavefunction2• 11 years ago

Hopefully this puts more interest among executives and managers towards distributed/remote teams.

mhurron• 11 years ago

Know how I know you didn't read the article?

wavefunction2• 11 years ago

I read some of the article. Did you know that? I guess you signaled that you did not know that with your contentless comment.

DanBC3• 11 years ago

I'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• 11 years ago

In 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

digi_owl• 11 years ago

that 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...

toyg3• 11 years ago

People 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_lon4• 11 years ago

Are you sure it applies to Salleried roles?

lmm2• 11 years ago

Because the UK law is a different law from this European law, and uses its own definition of working.

D_Alex• 11 years ago

So... 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.

scrollaway2• 11 years ago

Your 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.

Frozenlock5• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years ago

Like Germany, unemployment rate 4.7% and strong job protections?

Frozenlock5• 11 years ago

No, 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-...

bildung3• 11 years ago

Virtually all jobs affected by this ruling are in the local services and construction business. Think masons, plumbers, etc.

As a) these jobs are by definition locally bound and b) the ruling affects all employers in these industries equally, I have a hard time seeing how that should negatively affect the employment situation.

Edit: We had a similar event in Germany: About a year ago a minimum wage law has been introduced. The industries affected are largely the same. The fears were the same: Overregulation was expected to be a job killer. The empirical results: New regular jobs have been created in these industries.

ionised3• 11 years ago

The last thing we want is less regulation and employee protections.

Frozenlock5• 11 years ago

Yup, right into step 3.

supriyarao• 11 years ago

Would love to see this implemented in Bangalore! With the traffic jams, one could get paid for just leaving home to get to work

xwat• 11 years ago

Haha yeah, then you would see how fast would corporations allow working remotely (if the nature of the work makes it possible).

century192• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years ago

Sad, 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.

century192• 11 years ago

-- Ideally with punishment

Yes, or shame. "It will look like you aren't a hard worker."

Symbiote2• 11 years ago

At 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• 11 years ago

Rightly 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.

rockdoe3• 11 years ago

It's already the law in France (no business travel in weekends), exactly to protect workers against situations like that.

spacecowboy_lon4• 11 years ago

So for salaried roles you would not calculate your TOIL if you had to travel at weekends BTW the convention in the UK was working on Sunday = 2X plus a day.

Leynos• 11 years ago

My employers suggest that any business travel be done during normal office hours if possible. And I am inclined to agree with them.

rockdoe3• 11 years ago

Does this apply to consultants going to a customer (where they may be for a longer period of time)?

Cthulhu_5• 11 years ago

I'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.

rockdoe3• 11 years ago

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.

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_lon4• 11 years ago

I suspect not as I woudl imagine that Managerial and Professional jobs are excluded

dnautics• 11 years ago

IANAL, 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• 11 years ago

It 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.

LoSboccacc• 11 years ago

I don't know the generics, but this applies to employees in Italy. That rules consultants out from the catch all national contracts unless especially agreed upon beforehand.

IAN(Y/A)L

bullen• 11 years ago

No, travelling to a work today is just stupid, work from home!

coldtea• 11 years ago

How does that work for a plumber? You fix your own plumbing?

xacaxulu2• 11 years ago

For a lot of people on Hacker News, traveling to work is stupid. Of course electricians and plumbers must go on-site, but let's consider the general audience here.

roel_v3• 11 years ago

The 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!

DanBC3• 11 years ago

Doesn'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• 11 years ago

From 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_v3• 11 years 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).

pluma3• 11 years ago

The situation is different because in this case the resulting (permanent) change in the employees' commute was something they couldn't have been aware of at the time they signed the employment contract.

For care workers working on site at clients the varying commute is a condition of their employment at the time they sign the contract. Unless the client's home is in an extremely remote area, there's nothing wrong with the varying commutes.

emp_zealoth• 11 years ago

I believe you are right. I think the law doesn't regard all commutes, "fixed" workplaces are exempt:

A) You go to your workplace to arrive at 8 am, then you travel 150km away to a site. Your commute to the "base" is not included, however, your work time is until you arrive at the base and leave

B) Some employers would just tell you to be at the site at 8am - you'd have to leave 2 hours earlier and not be paid for it

In my understanding, the law regards B, making the employer pay you for your time (I KNOW, THE HORROR /s)

chrismcb• 11 years ago

I think you are misunderstanding the ruling. And while the headline isn't 100% correct! it is more inline with what everyone is discussing than what you claim it is. At one time the employed commuted to a regional office. From there they would travel to the client site. Now the office is closed, the company no longer has an office in the area. Now the employees commute from their home to a client site. Some days it was longer than before, some days shorter. Before the closure, the company paid for commuting from the fixed office to the site. Now it doesn't. The court said it was wrong, and if you are expected to commute from your home to a non fixed point you deserve compensation. The fact that the office closed isn't really important. What is important is there is no fixed office that you commute to first. This is not the case that the new office is further than the old one.

furyg3• 11 years ago

In 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• 11 years ago

That sounds very reasonable. That leaves the power in the hands of the employee and makes it very simple for the employer.

alistairSH• 11 years ago

My 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• 11 years ago

IIRC this is how the IRS recommends milage expenses are to be treated. The delta of your normal commute = work.

unfamiliar• 11 years ago

Sounds like the employees got screwed over. Why not just pay everyone for all the driving hours they did? Then if you happen to live next to the client you don't get paid for driving you didn't do, and you can get more actual work done too.

zhte415• 11 years ago

Tangential, 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• 11 years ago

Same thing in Brazil.

xacaxulu2• 11 years ago

The 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• 11 years ago

Not 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• 11 years ago

This, 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• 11 years ago

Clickbait title.

jksmith• 11 years ago

Start 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• 11 years ago

I'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• 11 years ago

I'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• 11 years ago

This 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

conceit2• 11 years ago

My place of work is fixed, but it's not an office. So, does this apply to me? :)

Travelling to work 'is work', European court rules

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