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EU Court: Commuting to Customer Sites Counts as Work
Joe_Dragon writes with news that the European Court of Justice has issued a ruling (PDF) saying that workers who have to commute to see customers, but don't have a "fixed or habitual place of work," must have their transit time at the beginning and end of the day count as working time. In other words, driving to your normal office every day doesn't count toward your paycheck, but leaving home in the morning to go visit a client or customer at your employer's request does. This added commute time also counts toward weekly labor limits — EU regulations for working conditions prohibit employers from making their employees work more than 48 hours a week on average. The court said, Given that traveling is an integral part of being such a worker, the place of work of that worker cannot be reduced to the physical areas of his work on the premises of the employer’s customers. 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.
Seems fair.
It is nice to see some more protections for workers, but is this all?
I don't think I'm missing some important change that will come from this, aside pissy employers ranting.
...exactly like it should be.
Someone literate appears to have hijacked Joe_Dragon's account.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Without this it's possible for someone to spend 80 hours working during the week and only get paid for half that much or less. When someone is following their employer's instructions and carrying out their job duties they're at work and on the clock, it's that simple. Someone who works principally in an office and travels irregularly occasionally has to deal with a special situation. Someone whose principal employment involves travelling to and from various job sites should have that travel counted as part of their work day.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
In my part of Canada a contract worker who has to travel to somewhere else to do work can easily claim the travel time as a business expense. They just have to do "some work" at their home office at the beginning and end of the day. At that point they have started work and travel to/from somewhere else is a business expense. How much they are paid and for what is something else.
An employee traveling to/from home and their employer's business is out of luck.
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOOOO! MOOOOOO! Moo cows MOOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU EU COWS!!
The EU is already lagging in the developed world in productivity
http://images.forbes.com/media...
Why not put a few businesses out of business and raise the cost for those remaining.
Yes 48 hrs per week for day time work, you do a single hour of night time work it becomes a 40 hrs working week for that month.
The way it's calculated differs per country but it could be something like a maximum of 1040 hrs per 6 months.,
Probably not a surprise but the UK opted out of this and other EU workers protection regulations.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
If you know your place of employment, commuting is up to you - you can live close by if you prefer. But if you have to go where your employer tells you every day, commuting is on them.
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...pretty normal for most companies. If you have to travel for a day to get to a conference, they count that travelling as work.
The people who suffer are people like low-grade health-care workers who visit patients at home. In the UK private agency workers may have 6 patients to see in a day, spend half an hour with each, and get paid for 3 hours work. But it can take them an hour to get between each patient, and they don't get paid for that. So, 3 hours pay for 9 hours work. It's a scandal, and this case may set a precedent for changing it...
I interviewed for a job at this one office and they where not even paying full mileage to customers sites or even the tolls to get to them.
They said we don't have to pay the number of miles it takes to get to our main office to your home each way when going to differnt customers sites from your home most of the week. They said that you where scheduled came into the office one a week (other then maybe times where customers sites needed a visit that day)
The EU didn't already have this? There is a reason most roving salesmen are asked to come to the office for a quick pep talk first thing each day. :)
I'm sorry, did a court just make a completely reasonable ruling that makes total sense and is fair to all involved?
Gosh, what has this world come to?
If I call up my employee and say, "hey, I need you to go to XYZ customer's office and do ABC", then clearly from that point until they get back to where they were (home), they are "on the clock".
I honestly can't imagine doing it any other way, maybe I'm weird?
If the start and end commute are over, let's say 45 minutes, then i'd say this is fair enough because given the choice most people wouldn't choose a job with such commute times. However any shorter than that it's basically giving the finger to every single worker on the planet who has to fight through 30 minutes of traffic every morning just to get to work.
Case 1: I work every day in an office 20 miles away (or 100 yards away) from my home. I pay for the journey out of my own pocket and don't get paid as working (in some countries, like Germany, the cost of travel is tax deductible).
Case 2: My office is 20 miles away (or 100 yards away) from my home. When I get there, my boss sends me to a client anywhere in the country (within reason). I pay the journey to the office out of my own pocket and don't get paid for working for the time. The company pays for my journey to the client and pays the driving time as work time.
Case 3: There is no office. I drive from home to a client and back. This ruling effectively says that this situation is handled exactly the same as if my office was in the home next door, which is entirely logical.
Like any law or ruling, there are certainly loopholes or workarounds. An obvious one would be to obtain a [small] office near/in the customer premises. Then the long commute is to this assigned business office, with a short hop to the customer.
The real problem is you cannot legislate morality or fairmindedness. A market economy can balanece things to the extent competition operates. An unfair employer loses employees (a big deal in IT). However, the EU is especially keen to entrench "employee rights" and thereby lessen competition for employees. If you cannot fire, you will be very reluctant to hire. So the EU is stuck with regs upon regs.
This ruling has nothing at all to do with worker's paycheck. The ruling only relates to the working time directive -- the maximum hours someone can be required to work -- not whether that time counts towards pay.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
I am going to perform a Joe_Dragon translation service. I think I did this years ago...
I interviewed for a job at a certain office one day, and they were not even planning to reimburse the full mileage cost to travel to customers' sites -- or even to reimburse road tolls.
They said, "We wouldn't have to pay the number of miles it takes to get to our main office from your home, when your work commute would be from your home to the customer's site for most days of the week." They further clarified that the person they would hire would only be scheduled to come into the office one day per week (unless a customer needed a visit that day as well).
The actual productivity of the French per hour worked is significantly higher than America - they just work less hours. Maybe it's because Facebook is an American product, so it's boycotted in France ;) (Don't bother to tell me it's not boycotted!)
Yet another mis titled article.
This on affects works who have not office and go directly to the job site from home , in Europe.
It is quite narrow.
The company that cause the issue will have to figure out how to spend the minimum amount of money.
Most places I worked for and that had these types of workers had this in some form already in place.
I wonder how this will affect the occasional travaler. e.g. the person who works in one office, but needs to go to a meeting at another office for a day. To me it was always a bit giving and taking. I do a longer day that day and they won't moan when the next Friday I leave a bit earlier.
OTOH if they don't want to do that, I can become very precise with counting my hours and minutes as well.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Take care of your Invisible Hands. They could get caught somewhere.
Prostitutes or fancy meals must be very expensive where you live.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Thats common law in Austria and Germany already. If the customer wants you to go somewhere he'd better well be ready to pay for the time it takes me to get there.
You should see how the private care agencies in the UK handle it, workers who are paid poorly to begin with, doing 15 minute visits to people in their own homes to provide vital care and support, are only paid from the moment they arrive and use the landline to phone in with the company until they ring to say they're leaving, all the time travelling, and probably completing paperwork in the car as there can't be time to do it and provide support to service users, throughout the day is unpaid, and there's a lot of it.
can i telecommute to eu?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I work for a SMB consultancy and we had this debate concerning mileage reimbursement. None of the engineers had an office presence at our small office -- we worked from home or at client locations. I started when the company was quite small and the owners were willing to pay for ALL mileage (except from home to office and back trips), partly because many customers were required to pay a trip charge of $25 so the owner was already making a profit on trips under about 50 miles.
At some point as they became more sophisticated and were worried they were running into a tax liability for mileage reimbursements not covered by IRS rules. They wanted to cut any reimbursements involving trips to/from home and client locations.
Since we didn't have any choice involving customers and a significant minority were distant (ie, round trips of 70 miles), I made a stink about it. I argued that tax liability wasn't the issue -- whether or not they were able to deduct our mileage reimbursement as a tax deduction wasn't my concern.
The business model was on site IT support. Asking me to bear 100% of the cost of supporting their business model isn't remotely equitable -- they need to provide compensation for the use my capital (car) in their business model. The alternative is they provide me with a car to fulfill their business model, which I guarantee will be more expensive than a mileage reimbursement. Plus, they are getting trip charges from the customer, so it's not like they're not already exceeding their cost to me in travel compensation.
Surprisingly, they bought this argument, at least for me as a long-serving worker who had basically received this compensation for several years.
because most folks don't. Nowadays if you want to move up you need to get promoted (maybe) or more likely move to a new position/company. Even if you get "raises" they're likely 2-2.5%. Given that inflation's around 3% (5-7%% if you only look at necessities like food, shelter, health care, education and transportation) that's basically a paycut every year. What you generally _won't_ see is real paycuts, because they're bad press.
So would you please stop spreading this nonsense that everytime workers get something good it will just be taken away from them. Hell, let's assume your B.S. is true. Doesn't that mean we're in a massive race to the bottom and an unwinable solution? Wouldn't that mean that workers have fundamentally lost the ability to bargain effectively? If you're OK with going back to a early 1900s style dystopian then fine. Say that and be done. Otherwise the only option is broad scale socialist reforms to restore the balance you claim is gone.
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Simple, ain't it?
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I live in Los Angeles and I think commute time should count in some way for all jobs. This would motivate businesses and city government to do practical civil engineering. Do something like half time or such.
If your going to have a business you need affordable housing near that business where people want to live. If your driving more than an hour a day or two hours on rapid transit then something is obviously wrong.
Every employee would have a baseline commuting time. Work hours start after the employee has driving his usual commute time. Businesses that have no established office could designate some street address as Home base. Employees would drive to the home base first several times to establish a commute time for themselves.
If your client is close to where you live you get to drink another cup of coffee before you start work.