All the Member States of the European Union "must impose on employers the obligation to establish an objective, reliable and accessible system that allows the measurement of the duration of the daily working time performed by each worker".This is confirmed by the ruling issued last May 14 by the Court of Justice of the EU for the cause of the Spanish trade unionFederacióndeserviciosdecomisionesobrerasagainst theDeutscheBank.
The union organization had turned to the Spanish Central Court asking to oblige the bank to set up a system of recording working hours, allowing to verify the application of the contract in terms of hours woked and to fulfil the obligation to transmit to the unions the monthly information on overtime.DeutscheBankhad replied that the Spanish Supreme Court's jurisprudence shows that there is no such obligation in Spanish law.The Spanish Court then submitted the case to the European Court of Justice, for which «the right of each worker to a limitation of the maximum duration of work and to periods of daily and weekly rest is a norm of the Union's social law which covers a of particular importance and also expressly enshrined in Article 31, paragraph 2 of the Charter, to which Article 6, paragraph 1 of the EUTrecognizes the samelegalvalueof the Treaties ".
Considering that "the intent is to guarantee the observance of this fundamental right", it follows that "the provisions of Directive 2003/88 cannot be subject to a restrictive interpretation to the detriment of the rights which the worker derives from the latter".Not only.For the Court, "the objective and reliable determination of the number of daily and weekly working hours is essential to establish, on the one hand, whether the maximum weekly working time defined in Article 6 of Directive 2003/88 (for each period of 7 days not exceeding 48 hours, including overtime) has been respected during the reference period referred to in Article 16, letter b (reference period not exceeding four months), and on the other if the minimum periods of daily and weekly rest, (during each 24-hour period, a minimum rest period of 11 consecutive hours and for each 7-day period, a minimum uninterrupted rest period of 24 hours), have been observed ».
Consequently "a national regulation that does not provide for the obligation to use an instrument that allows to establish objectively and reliably the number of daily and weekly working hours is not suitable to guarantee the useful effect of the rights conferred by Article 31 , paragraph 2 of the Charter and this directive, since it deprives both employers and workers of the possibility of verifying whether these rights are respected and can therefore compromise the objective of said directive, which is to guarantee better protection of safety and workers' health ".
To ensure the effect of the rights provided by the directive on working time and the Charter, the EU Court concludes, the Member States must impose "on employers the obligation to establish a system that allows the measurement of the duration of the time daily work done by each worker ".The obligation of defining the concrete ways of implementing such a system lies with the Member States.