Working time directive question

zagfles

chainsaw wrote: »

There is a lot of rubbish talked about the WTD / WTR and what employers can and cannot do. I have looked into it in some depth.

What are you allowed to do when you are on call but not actually working? Do you have to stay at home waiting for a call? Do you have to respond immediately you receive a call? Can you go to the cinema / football match / shopping / visit family 10 miles away?

If you have to stay in a place designated by your employer ready to respond immediately then all the hours you are on call are worked hours even if you are asleep in bed in which case by 20.30hr you would not be able to work any more and be able to have a 11 hr break before you start work the next day.

Yes we went through all this at our place - nobody wanted our "on-call" time to be defined as working for the WTD because then we'd have had to do 12 hours shifts, and have 2 shifts on at the weekend rather than one, which would have meant twice as many ruined weekends for everyone. And also would have made it hard to manage with leave etc. So we agreed a definition of our on-call time which didn't count as "working" for the WTD.

C_Mababejive

chainsaw wrote: »

There is a lot of rubbish talked about the WTD / WTR and what employers can and cannot do. I have looked into it in some depth.

What are you allowed to do when you are on call but not actually working? Do you have to stay at home waiting for a call? Do you have to respond immediately you receive a call? Can you go to the cinema / football match / shopping / visit family 10 miles away?

If you have to stay in a place designated by your employer ready to respond immediately then all the hours you are on call are worked hours even if you are asleep in bed in which case by 20.30hr you would not be able to work any more and be able to have a 11 hr break before you start work the next day.

The WTR's say you have to have 11hr continuous rest between shifts, its not really a choice for you or your employer to ignore this although many, most even do ignore it.

Your employer should have a Risk Assessment procedure in place if you work long hours, do they? I bet they do but they have not made the workforce aware of it.

I don't think you have given us enough information about how you work, what your job is and how you are paid for anyone to answer your question properly.

But what about if you were on call and you work from home but were restricted in that you could not go out or carry on certain activities because a call out would require an immediate response? surely this could be compared to a situation whereby you were required to be at your place of work..i,e restricted?

zagfles

C_Mababejive wrote: »

But what about if you were on call and you work from home but were restricted in that you could not go out or carry on certain activities because a call out would require an immediate response? surely this could be compared to a situation whereby you were required to be at your place of work..i,e restricted?

As I understand it that would count as "working". Our on-call is much the same although we can go out very locally. But there's no way we wanted it defined as working for the reasons I gave in my PP, so we got together with management and the union and put together a definition of on-call which meant it wasn't defined at "working" for the WTD.

It's a bit silly when workers have to find a way to get round rules which are supposedly there to help them!

scheming_gypsy

C_Mababejive wrote: »

because a call out would require an immediate response? ?

an immediate response for on call is just answering the phone (or at least in every on call scenario, I've been involved in), so you make sure your work phone is available. Once you've answered the phone you need to work within the time scales for the resolution

buggy_boy

Yeah I think that is our best bet stick together, interesting I have read that a group agreement can overide the WTD rules on rest, so hopefully they can come up with an agreement.

Im not sure how much it is the company actually wanting to implement it or as it has come out during pay negotiations the company is using it as a big stick to try and force us to have another year of little or no pay rises.

chainsaw

zagfles

You cannot agree a definition of call out that does not count as working time. According to the WTR your method of working either is or is not working time regardless of what you agree with your management. Thats the whole point of the WTR to stop such agreements to make sure people are working safely and not being abused. That said I accept that such agreements are made all over the country and as long as no one complains and often even if someone does nothing will be done about the law being broken.

If you have an agreement that suits you great but I think most people are not aware of the WTR and have all sorts of shifts and call outs pushed on them illegally they may prefer not to do. They may even agree to long hours for the overtime and whilst we have all been there that does not make it right or legal.

WTR's are there to help you, they are also there to protect you from yourself and protect others from you. I know people who often work 24hrs without sleep. When they kill someone driving home whose fault will it be? For a start they broke the WTR but that will be the least of their problems. Their managers should be worried as well, they might find themselves up for corporate manslaughter.

scheming_gypsy

There are lots of jobs that require an immediate response on call that involves more than answering the phone. Many jobs require you to be out the door immediately and in the company vehicle to proceed to a job without delay. Having the company phone with you at the cinema 10 miles away when you are with your family is not allowed in such jobs. The company does not want to wait for you to return home to collect your vehicle and they certainly don't want you taking your family to the job, that's assuming you are even allowed to use it for private use.

The WTR says " An adult worker is entitled to a rest period of not less than eleven consecutive hours in each 24-hour period during which he works for his employer."

We all know there are circumstances when that's not possible. People get caught and have to work late sometimes like a fireman putting out a fire, a doctor doing an operation but these sensible exceptions don't give employers the right to design shifts that routinely break the WTR.[FONT=&quot][/FONT]

zagfles

chainsaw wrote: »

zagfles

You cannot agree a definition of call out that does not count as working time. According to the WTR your method of working either is or is not working time regardless of what you agree with your management. Thats the whole point of the WTR to stop such agreements to make sure people are working safely and not being abused. That said I accept that such agreements are made all over the country and as long as no one complains and often even if someone does nothing will be done about the law being broken.

If you have an agreement that suits you great but I think most people are not aware of the WTR and have all sorts of shifts and call outs pushed on them illegally they may prefer not to do. They may even agree to long hours for the overtime and whilst we have all been there that does not make it right or legal.

WTR's are there to help you, they are also there to protect you from yourself and protect others from you. I know people who often work 24hrs without sleep. When they kill someone driving home whose fault will it be? For a start they broke the WTR but that will be the least of their problems. Their managers should be worried as well, they might find themselves up for corporate manslaughter.

We didn't agree a definition of "call out", we agreed a definition of "on call", or standby. These are hours when we are not doing any work, we are at home or out very locally.

To define time at home watching telly or sleeping as "working" is completely stupid so we defined the rules for being on-call such that they weren't counted as working for the WTD. They included being able to go out locally and not having to provide an "immediate" response.

We generally comply with the WTD for actual real working time (ie callout) although we aren't pedantic about it, for instance as I said above if I got a call 2300-2400 I probably wouldn't sit at home till 1100 before going into work just because the WTD says I must, I'd maybe go in an hour late.

scheming_gypsy

chainsaw wrote: »

scheming_gypsy

There are lots of jobs that require an immediate response on call that involves more than answering the phone. Many jobs require you to be out the door immediately and in the company vehicle to proceed to a job without delay. Having the company phone with you at the cinema 10 miles away when you are with your family is not allowed in such jobs. The company does not want to wait for you to return home to collect your vehicle and they certainly don't want you taking your family to the job, that's assuming you are even allowed to use it for private use.

.

That's great, but as i said.. in my experience an 'immediate response' is that you answer the phone within x amount of time. That's the response time, and from that point you have different service levels that you need to adhere to regarding the resolution,. I've never come across any on call situation that says you have to sit at home waiting, seeing as you're on call and not working.
You get a call and you answer it - immediate response
then the clock starts ticking for the resolution, so common sense tells you how far from home you can go but 'immediate response' is that you respond to the call immediately, so you don't get a voicemail and act on it 30 minutes later.

It'd be interesting to know what kind of job has the response you've mentioned though,

scheming_gypsy

chainsaw wrote: »

We all know there are circumstances when that's not possible. People get caught and have to work late sometimes like a fireman putting out a fire, a doctor doing an operation but these sensible exceptions don't give employers the right to design shifts that routinely break the WTR.

they're actually exempt.

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/WorkingHoursAndTimeOff/DG_10029451

Exceptions to the regulations

Your working week is not covered by the Working Time Regulations if you work in the following areas:

• jobs where you can choose freely how long you will work (such as a managing executive)
• the armed forces, emergency services and police are excluded in some circumstances
• domestic servants in private houses

The rights to breaks apply differently to you if:

• you have to travel a long distance from your home to get to work
• you constantly work in different places making it difficult to work to a set pattern
• you are doing security or surveillance-based work
• you are working in an industry with busy peak periods, like agriculture, retail or tourism
• there is an emergency or risk of an accident
• the job needs round-the-clock staffing (such as hospital work)
• you are employed in the rail industry and you work on board trains or your activities are irregular or linked to seeing that trains run on time

hcb42

scheming_gypsy wrote: »

The rights to breaks apply differently to you if:

• you are working in an industry with busy peak periods, like agriculture, retail or tourism

ah so that's ok for hotels then, every one I have worked in runs late /early shifts on reception, finishing say 1115pm and back in for 7am.

OP, are your employer still saying they will pay you for being on call....if so are you still not better off doing these even with the rest time. ?