European Labour Law Journal

The CJEU’S Matzak judgment raises diverse and important questions concerning (not only) working time regulation in the European Union. The present special issue sheds light on some of these questions, more specifically with regard to the Working Time Directive‘s personal scope as well as the notions of working time and rest time under EU law. The Directive’s scope is linked to the concept of worker and the criteria to construct it and, in the context of the Matzak case, leads to interesting questions about the position of volunteers in EU law and the problem of concurrent contracts. In this respect, exploring a purposive approach attending to the health and safety aims of the Directive may be fruitful. The boundaries between working time and rest time are far from clear, especially in situations of stand-by and on call time. Here the proposal of an intermediate category related to the idea of quality of rest time is discussed.

The paper discusses the concept of the term worker in European labour law, focusing on the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union in the Matzak case. First, the facts that are essential to Mr Matzak’s qualification as a worker are presented. In a second step, the part of the Court’s decision which refers to the concept of ‘worker’ is analysed. The third and main part deals in detail with the current discussion of the concept of the term ‘worker’ in EU law. This analysis should make it possible to systemise the decisions of the Court. Finally, an attempt is made to classify the decision of the Court in the Matzak within its own case law and to assess its consequences for future decisions.

One aspect also addressed in the Matzak case is the personal scope of the Working Time Directive 2003/88 (WTD), as Mr Matzak is a ‘volunteer firefighter’ and it is not clear if such persons are covered by this piece of EU legislation. This article will therefore first explore the notion of ‘volunteer’ and then examine under what circumstances volunteers are to be considered workers for the purpose of the WTD. It will become evident that the element of remuneration/pay has a special relevance in this context although this is not really in line with the health and safety purpose of the WTD. A purposive approach of defining the personal scope of application of the WTD might lead to more suitable results.

The European Union competences on health and safety of workplace constituted the legal basis for the 93/104 Directive to be adopted (and for the consolidated text of 2003/88 Directive). The Court of Justice has firmly maintained this approach refusing to take into account the history of international regulation on working time, which links together work and salary in perspective to give the workers the right to fair and equal treatment as regards their working conditions (as has been recently proclaimed also by the European Pillar of Social Rights). Building on these general premises, this article analyses the more recent European pieces of legislation and cases related to on-call time and proposes a new model for the definition of working time in the light of CJEU case law.

The present elaboration is dedicated to one of the aspects of the Matzak judgment, where CJEU ruled that a standby time which a volunteer firefighter spends at home with the duty to respond to calls from his employer within a few minutes, very significantly restricting the opportunities to do other activities, must be regarded as working time under the Directive 2003/88. The position of the Advocate General, who suggested that ‘the degree of freedom enjoyed by the worker’ and ‘the quality of time’ while a worker is on standby duty should be assessed, as well as the Court’s opinion, that the temporal and geographical constraints imposed on the on-call worker are of decisive importance, have been analysed. In the Author’s view, the binary relationship between ‘working time’ and ‘rest period’, as provided by Directive 2003/88, does not always meet the requirements of the current labour market. Moreover, in the digital age the ‘rest period’ does not necessarily amount to genuine free time. The Author examines possible further legislative developments concerning the concepts of working time and rest period, including the newly emerging idea of the right to disconnect, i.e. the worker’s ability to disconnect from work, especially by not engaging in electronic work-related communications during his rest period.