European Court Of Justice Expands The Definition Of Working Time

The European Court of Justice ("ECJ") recently issued a decision regarding the paid working time of certain mobile employees that will have a significant impact on companies with employees in the European Union. The ECJ's decision in Federación de Servicios Provados del sindicto Comisiones obreras (CC.OO.) v. Tyco Integrated Security SL, Tyco Integrated Fire & Security Corporation Servicios SA,1 expands the definition of working time of peripatetic employees (i.e., employees who are not assigned to a fixed or habitual place of work) to include what would normally be viewed as commute time. The impact of the decision will affect how multinational companies calculate (and thus, compensate) hours worked for those employees who do not have a fixed office or habitual place of work.

Background

The defendants in the case are Tyco Integrated Security SL and Tyco Integrated Fire & Security Corporation Servicios SA (collectively, "Tyco"), multinational fire and security companies that install and maintain antitheft security systems. In 2011, Tyco closed its regional offices in Spain, and assigned all employees, including its technicians, to a central office in Madrid. Tyco technicians are responsible for traveling to customer sites to install and maintain security equipment in homes and on industrial and commercial premises located within the geographical area assigned to them.

With the centralization of Tyco, the technicians lost their regional offices. Instead, the technicians are assigned to work from their homes and use a company vehicle to travel directly to and from customer locations. Each evening, the technicians receive via an application to their mobile devices a task list identifying the next day's customer appointments and locations within their geographical area. The distances from the technicians' homes to the first or last customer location for the day vary and could encompass a distance of over 100 kilometers (60+ miles) and, depending on traffic, entail a three-hour commute one way.

Tyco counted the travel time between customers as working time, but did not count the commute time between a technician's home and his/her first customer and last customer as working time. Therefore, a technician's work day would begin when he/she arrived at the first customer location of the day, and would end when the technician left the premises of the last appointment of the day. The Federación de Servicios Privados del sindicato Comissiones obreras...