Social right. Can European law supplement, in certain points, the French labor code? Article 31 of the Charter of European Union fundamental rights (EU) provides that “ every worker has the right to a limitation of maximum working hours and to daily and weekly rest periods (…) ».
It is specified in the European treaties that “the Union supports and supplements the action of the Member States in the field of improving the working environment, to protect the safety and health of workers” : this subsidiary competence has led, among other things, to the development of a European law on working time.
Thus, the European directive 2003/88 imposes in particular on the Member States of the EU a limited weekly working time, a certain break time, a minimum period of daily rest or even a minimum period of weekly rest. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), in a judgment of 2021, considered that the Member States cannot unilaterally determine the scope of the concept of ” work time “which must be defined according to objective characteristics and in accordance with the purpose of the directive.
Reverse French law
Already in 2015, the CJEU had, on the basis of article 2 of the European directive 2003/88, decided that “in circumstances in which workers do not have a fixed or usual place of work, constitutes ‘working time’, within the meaning of this provision, the travel time that these workers devote to daily travel between their home and the sites of the first and last clients designated by their employer”.
French law does not see things in the same way: article L. 3121-4 of the Labor Code lays down, on the contrary, in principle that “the time spent on business travel to get to the place of performance of the employment contract is not effective working time (…) »except to be collected, under conditions, ” compensation “.
It is in this context that a court of appeal made the reading of the European judge prevail over the French text. She had noted that an employee had no usual place of work, and that his employer asked him to intervene with a company vehicle as part of a scheduled visit route over a very large geographical area.
available to the employer
The court also found that the employee had to, during home-customer travel time, be at the disposal of the employer and comply with his instructions without being able to go about his personal business: these times are therefore actual working time to be remunerated.
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