European Court and German Labour Court issue key employment rulings

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that travel time to a work site must be classified as working time if the employer dictates the route, time, and vehicle, and the employee is not free to use the time for personal purposes. This decision follows a dispute in Spain where a landscaping company counted the journey to a central base as working time but excluded the return trip. The ruling clarifies that under the EU Working Time Directive, there is no separate category for ‘travel time’; if an employee is at the employer's disposal and following instructions, they are working.

In a separate legal development, the German Federal Labour Court (BAG) ruled against a worker seeking additional severance pay. Despite working in the same factory logistics area since 2014, the employee's seniority for severance calculations only began in 2017. The court determined that because the worker was initially employed by a temporary agency through an external logistics provider rather than the final employer, those initial years did not count toward the tenure required by the social tariff agreement.