Federal Labor Court confirms obligation to Recording of working hours

14/09/2022

As early as 2019, the European Court of Justice ruled that all employers must introduce a system for recording working hours (AZ C-55/18). The German Working Hours Act so far only provides for the recording of overtime and Sunday work; the revision of this law and the integration of the ECJ ruling is currently being driven forward by the German government.

However, with its ruling of September 13, 2022 (1ABR 22/21), the German Federal Labor Court has now determined, even before the revision of the Working Hours Act: the ECJ ruling is already binding for Germany and employers are obliged to systematically record the working hours of their employees. As a result, the frequently practiced trust-based working time models are likely to finally be on the brink of extinction.

The ECJ's ruling of 14.05.2019 affects not only large companies and corporations, but above all small and medium-sized enterprises that have not kept any documentation at all on working hours to date. The ECJ explicitly stipulates the use of a "system", so that in the future it will no longer be sufficient to document working hours by hand or in the form of Excel tables.

These rulings have far-reaching consequences for the event industry in particular. It is not only the fact that working hours have not been recorded at all in many companies that poses a problem. The complete documentation is likely to reveal violations of the Working Hours Act in many places, which will have to be taken into account in the planning and bidding phase of events in the future. Otherwise, companies run the risk of being stuck with the additional costs for personnel or even penalties.

All companies in the event industry, but also in any other industry, are well advised to deal promptly with the topic of working time recording and the available solutions. The company CrewBrain offers a software solution for recording working hours, especially in the event business. This cloud-based solution does not require any fixed hardware elements, but can be used by employees from anywhere and around the clock via smartphone. Thus, the software offers all prerequisites to enable working time recording in the event business despite the constantly changing locations.