§4 Transposition obligations on Member States
The Directive allows collective agreements to establish the duration and terms of the break. Nevertheless, the duty to transpose the Directive resides with the Member States (188). It is therefore their responsibility to ensure that all workers, including those who may not be covered by collective agreements, are entitled to a break. The Directive’s wording establishes that the duration and terms of the rest break are defined by collective agreements or national legislation. This in turn means that national transposition texts may not leave the duration and terms of the rest break to be defined by individual agreements between the worker and the employer concerned. Weekly rest Article 5 provides that: ‘Member States shall take the measures necessary to ensure that, per each seven-day period, every worker is entitled to a minimum uninterrupted rest period of 24 hours plus the 11 hours’ daily rest referred to in Article 3. If objective, technical or work organisation conditions so justify, a minimum rest period of 24 hours may be applied.’ In addition, Article 16 establishes that: ‘Member States may lay down: (a) for the application of Article 5 (weekly rest period), a reference period not exceeding 14 days; […]’ The 1993 Directive had a somewhat different wording in Article 5 as it included the following sentence: ‘The minimum rest period referred to in the first subparagraph shall in principle include Sunday’. However, this provision was annulled by the Court, which considered that the obligation to fix Sunday rather than any other day of the week as a rest day was not justified in the light of the legal basis used for this Directive, which relates to the protection of the health and safety of workers (189). The sentence was then deleted during the Directive’s amendment by way of Directive 2000/34/EC. Although case-law to date is limited on the subject of weekly rest, the Commission nevertheless outlines the following considerations in light of the wording and objective of the Directive.
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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-09-07