A. Meeting the challenges of changing work organisation
The 1993 Directive came into force almost 30 years ago, in a society where, overall, employment relationships were more homogeneous and work organisation more standardised in the common ‘9 to 5’ working day. However, over the past decades, working time regulation has been increasingly confronted by new forms of employment and new ways of organising work, through the rise of e.g. remote work, mobile work, on-demand work, platform work or multiple employment. These changes have been brought about and/or accelerated by the impact of digitalisation on the economies and societies of the EU. Indeed, digital transformation has further enabled more flexible working arrangements, addressing both workers’ aspirations for work-life balance and well-being at work and businesses’ search for increased productivity and agility in a globalised economy. The Working Time Directive is therefore being implemented in a context marked by a new range of opportunities and risks. Flexible employment may lead to more use of the Directive’s derogations. Digitalisation is blurring the distinction between work and rest, and enables an increased fragmentation of work, both with regard to location and to time. At the same time, technology creates new possibilities for monitoring working time. The world of work has also been deeply impacted by the global Covid-19 pandemic. Measures taken by public authorities across the EU to limit the spread of disease led to a considerable and sudden increase in remote work. Restrictions introduced on sanitary grounds have entailed mandatory home-based telework for a sizeable proportion of workers (4). When the sanitary situation allowed for a progressive easing of restrictions, mandatory telework has, to a large extent, given way to more use of voluntary telework. For the growing proportion of workers whose functions can be performed remotely (5), the Covid-19 pandemic may mark the start of a lasting trend towards more home-based telework, combined with presence at the employer’s premises during part of the working time, so that workers perform ‘hybrid work’. In this context, the present Communication updates the previous version published in 2017 with recent developments in the case-law of the Court. The most significant of these judgments are: The Matzak judgment (6) of 2018 and several other more recent judgments concerning the qualification of stand-by duty as either ‘working time’ or ‘rest periods’. Those judgments deal with the issue of stand-by outside the workplace, i.e. a period during which the worker is not required to remain at the workplace, but has to remain contactable and ready to respond within a certain time limit. The Court ruled that whether standby counts as ‘rest’ or ‘working time’ depends on the intensity of the constraints applied to the worker affecting how he or she can use stand-by time. The Court also appeared to recognise that, even if a stand-by period is qualified as a ‘rest period’, the obligation to be contactable and to react, whose corollary is the deprivation of the right to disconnect, may in fact be harmful to workers’ health and safety if it is imposed too frequently. The CCOO judgment (7) of 2019 on recording of working time. In this judgment, the Court ruled that Member States must require employers to set up a system enabling the duration of time worked each day by each worker to be measured. This raises complex questions notably in the case of workers performing remote work or telework who might enjoy a degree of flexibility and autonomy in organising and delivering work without physical supervision, for instance when it comes to the 11 hours of uninterrupted daily rest. The Academia de Studii Economice din Bucureşti judgment (8) of 2021. In that judgment the Court dealt with the issue of whether the provisions of the Directive set absolute limits in case of concurrent contracts with one or more employer(s) or if they apply to each employment relationship separately, in the specific case where an employee has concluded several contracts of employment with the same employer. The Court considered that the minimum daily rest period applies to those contracts taken as a whole and not to each of them taken separately. The Ministrstvo za obrambo judgment (9) of 2021, which concerns the applicability of the Working Time Directive to members of military personnel. The Court confirmed that in principle the Working Time Directive applies to such staff, however certain activities of members of the armed forces can be excluded from the scope of the Directive.
Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-09-25 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.