Judgment of the European Court of Justice helps protect the health of scheduled employees by giving them additional rest time

The distribution of working and rest time has a direct impact on people’s health. Overworked employees can endanger the life and health of themselves and their colleagues, spend more time doing repetitive work and be less creatively productive. Fatigue may lead to occupational accidents and a constant state of fatigue may result in an occupational disease. On 2 March 2023 the European Court of Justice made a judgement in Case C-477/21, directing Member States to protect the health of employees more effectively. The judgment will change the current implementation of working and rest time requirements in Estonia and may affect the organisation of work of companies whose employees work based on a schedule.

What will change? Pursuant to the judgment of the European Court of Justice, employers whose employees work based on a schedule have to review the calculation of working and rest time. Companies whose schedules currently allow for a relatively short time off work – for example, where employees are scheduled to work six days a week – will need to change their working time arrangements based on the guidelines below. The judgment does not affect the calculation of working time of employees who work eight hours a day from Monday to Friday.

The Employment Contracts Act sets out two important principles:

Daily rest time (§ 51), according to which employees must have at least 11 consecutive hours of rest time in a 24-hour period (meaning employees can work a maximum of 13 hours with overtime work per shift);

Weekly rest time (§ 52), according to which employees must have at least 48 consecutive hours of rest per week in the case of standard working time and at least 36 consecutive hours in the case of summarised working time.

What will need to be done differently? According to the judgment, daily rest time is not part of weekly rest time and must precede it. This means that, at least once in a seven-day period, employees must be given daily rest time and weekly rest time consecutively: 11 hours + 36 or 48 hours = a total of 47 or 59 hours. Until now, the working and rest time requirements have been considered met if employees had 36 or 48 consecutive hours of weekly rest time in a seven-day period without the daily rest time of 11 hours preceding it.

Example: Based on current practice, if a scheduled employee finishes work on Friday at 20:00 and is given weekly rest time, their new working day can start on Sunday at 8:00 (ie after 36 hours). Now, the weekly rest time must be preceded by the daily rest time, so the earliest the employee can start a new working day is Sunday at 19:00 (ie after 47 hours).

Why such a change? According to the court’s explanation, the daily and weekly rest time are two independent rights with different purposes. On the one hand, employees must be ensured the opportunity to be away from the working environment every day for a certain number of hours. On the other hand, employees must be able to rest in each seven-day period. The purpose of the judgment is to protect the health of employees. Providing employees with sufficient time off work and adhering to working and rest time limitations is essential to prevent and reduce overworking, occupational diseases and occupational accidents, and thus prevent employees from being absent from work for health reasons.

How to proceed? In order to ensure the effective and purposeful implementation of the Employment Contracts Act and to protect employee health, the Labour Inspectorate has the right to supervise compliance with the requirements of weekly and daily rest time. For employers to have sufficient time to make changes to their current work organisation and scheduling principles, they have until the end of 2023 to adapt to the interpretation of the changed act. The Labour Inspectorate will apply the new interpretation from 1 January 2024, with their supervision of working and rest time requirements. The interpretation of the European Court of Justice will be available in the future in the Employment Contracts Act handbook.

The Labour Inspectorate identifies nearly 100 working and rest time violations every year, the most common being failure to comply with the daily or weekly rest time requirement. Knowing that 55% of employees performed overtime work in 2021, giving employees sufficient time off work is especially important. On the one hand, daily and weekly rest time rules allow employees to step away from the working environment every day for a certain number of hours. On the other hand, they ensure that employees have a certain minimum amount of time off from work every week. Current statistics on occupational accidents suggest that occupational accidents happen when employees work for several hours without breaks. Giving employees enough time off work protects their health and wellbeing, and employers benefit from rested, healthy and productive employees.

For employers to have sufficient time to make the changes to their current work organisation and scheduling principles, they have until the end of this year to adapt to the interpretation of the changed act. The Labour Inspectorate will apply the new interpretation in their supervision of working and rest time requirements from 1 January 2024. If you have any questions, you can contact the counselling service of the Labour Inspectorate free of charge by phone (640 6000) or email ([email protected]).