II. LEGAL BASIS AND PURPOSE OF THE DIRECTIVE
The 1993 Directive was based on Article 118a of the Treaty establishing the European Community. This enabled minimum requirements to be adopted for gradual implementation with a view to ‘encouraging improvements, especially in the working environment, as regards the health and safety of workers’. In reply to a challenge to the use of this legal basis, the Court confirmed that it embraced all factors, physical or otherwise, capable of affecting the health and safety of workers in their working environment, including certain aspects of the organisation of working time. The Directive was therefore properly adopted on its basis (25). As a result, the current Directive, which repealed and replaced the 1993 one, was adopted by the European Parliament and the Council on the basis of the successor Article 137(2) of the Treaty establishing the European Community (26). This allows the adoption of directives establishing minimum requirements with a view to improving in particular the working environment to protect the health and safety of workers. Except for the increased scope of the Directive and deletion of the earlier provision that weekly rest should ‘in principle, include Sunday’, the provisions of the currently applicable Working Time Directive are drafted in terms which are essentially identical to those of the previous 1993 Directive and Directive 2000/34/EC (27), which amended it (28). For this reason, the developments set out in the Communication take into account, where appropriate, the answers given by the Court to questions referred to in the previous Directives. Unless otherwise provided, the provisions presented in this Communication are therefore extracted from the currently applicable text of Directive 2003/88/EC. Reference is made to the prior texts where necessary (29). In line with its legal basis, the purpose of the Directive as laid down in Article 1(1) and in several recitals (30) is to establish ‘minimum safety and health requirements for the organisation of working time’. The legal basis and purpose of the Directive are guiding principles in the Court’s interpretation of it and must therefore be taken into account. In addition, in line with Recital 4 of the Directive, which states that ‘[t]he improvement of workers’ safety, hygiene and health at work is an objective which should not be subordinated to purely economic considerations’, the Court has refused to take into account the economic and organisational consequences raised by Member States as to whether time spent on-call qualifies as working time (31).
Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-09-25 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.