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Is your business fulfilling its Working Time obligations?

A Spanish Trade Union (CCOO) brought a group action against Deutsche Bank SAE seeking a declaration from the National High Court that the bank was obliged to record the actual daily working time of its employees. The bank did not record hours worked on a particular day.

The CJEU held that the Working Time Directive required employers to keep records of actual time worked. If that was not the case it would not be possible to reliably determine either the number of hours worked by the worker or when that work was carried out.

The court found that such records were necessary to ensure that workers are benefitting from the limitation on weekly working time and minimum daily and weekly rest periods conferred on them by the Working Time Directive.

Following this judgment it seems the Working Time Regulations do not properly interpret the Working Time Directive into UK law. If EU law remains in force in the UK (which is a possibility regardless of whether we leave Europe) the Government will have to amend the Working Time Regulations to avoid the risk of claims against them for failure to transpose the Directive.

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