Where a worker has several employment contracts with the same employer, the minimum daily rest period applies to the contracts taken as a whole, and not to each of the contracts taken separately, according to a judgment by the Court of Justice of the European Union on Wednesday 17 March (case C-585/19).
The Romanian Ministry of National Education charged the University of Economic Studies in Bucharest (ASE) with a budgetary claim for the salary costs of employees in the implementation team of an EU-funded research project on economics.
The amounts that corresponded to these costs were declared ineligible due to the fact that they exceeded the maximum number of hours (13 hours) that these employees were able to work each day. In fact, during the period from October 2012 to January 2013, experts who had been hired by the ESA under a number of employment contracts had, on certain days, combined the eight daily hours worked as part of the basic working hours with the hours worked in connection with several projects, including the one in question.
The total number of hours worked per day in respect of these experts would therefore have exceeded the limit of thirteen hours per day laid down in the instructions of the project managing authority.
The case was referred to the Court of Justice by the Bucharest Regional Court and was examined under the Working Time Directive (2003/88/EC), which requires Member States to take the necessary measures to ensure that every worker has 11 consecutive hours’ rest per 24-hour period.
The Court noted that the concept of rest time and the concept of working time are mutually exclusive and that the Directive does not provide for any intermediate category between working time and rest periods. The requirement of the Directive cannot be satisfied if rest periods are examined separately for each employment contract between a worker and their employer. In such a situation, the hours deemed rest periods under one contract would be capable of constituting working time under another contract. It follows that the employment contracts concluded by a worker with their employer must be examined together.
See the judgment: http://bit.ly/3eO62BT (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)