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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.
Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-09-25 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.