Have on-call rules changed with Brexit

Serenity74

My employer operates an office staffed 9 to 5 Monday to Friday. This covers every employee in the organisation. Despite this they have for some reason been selling contracts that promise 24/7 support.

For the first few months they operated this on a voluntary basis, although as the volunteers were mostly the youngsters on 1st line I suspect some pressure was applied. Anyway they've made a large number of redundancies, blamed on covid despite it not really impacting our workload - if anything we've been busier, and also had people leave and not be replaced resulting in a staffing reduction of nearly 50% and the loss of a lot of people who did the on-call.

Sure you can see where this is heading! We have now been told we will be working 1 in 4 weeks on call 24/7. There was no discussion this was literally an email that was fired round to everyone telling us what weeks we'd be working. You can imagine how this has gone down and there has been push back but we're being told that since Brexit the rules have changed and basically the employer can do what they want. Now admittedly I have no idea what the rules were before let alone if they've changed but it seems a bit suspect to me.

We are being told that previously they couldn't implement 24/7 on-call due to a couple of EU rulings.

One being what defined working hours, which seemed to be if you're too restricted in what you can do with your own time it counts as work. To be clear what they are referring to on-call isn't being available for the odd emergency, they've sold a 24/7 service to customers where they are expecting the same response if they phone up at 2am Saturday morning as they would get at 10am on a Tuesday. This means you can in practice do nothing with your time as you have to be ready to take and action a call immediately. The employer is claiming your time is your own and you just need to make sure you have your laptop and phone with you but in reality that's not always practical so for me at least it will mean cancelling plans and sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring. You can't exactly fire up your laptop and start a remote support session halfway through your shopping trip to Tesco and we're expect to respond within minutes so you can't call someone back 30 minutes or an hour later.

The other is the issue of break time. We're being told that previously the EU required an 11 hour break between work days, with some exceptions for moving between shift patterns. So if they want you starting work at 9am you'd have to end being on-call at 10pm the previous day. Again they are saying this doesn't now apply as we're no longer in the EU.

I've worked on-call before but its never been an issue as its been for genuine 'the office is on fire' type emergencies, not things like the printer is out of paper at 3am. Does what they are requiring even count as on-call? Surely if you're selling a 24/7 service you have to set the company up to be staffed 24/7? Does any of this ring true? It seems more to me like something they've made up to achieve their own objectives, if you ask any questions they don't have the answers.

Don't want to be the troublemaker and we're already getting the 'you're lucky to have a job' line, equally don't want to be taken advantage of and have concerns about the mental health impact of what they are proposing.

General_Grant

Serenity74 said:

My employer operates an office staffed 9 to 5 Monday to Friday. This covers every employee in the organisation. Despite this they have for some reason been selling contracts that promise 24/7 support.

For the first few months they operated this on a voluntary basis, although as the volunteers were mostly the youngsters on 1st line I suspect some pressure was applied. Anyway they've made a large number of redundancies, blamed on covid despite it not really impacting our workload - if anything we've been busier, and also had people leave and not be replaced resulting in a staffing reduction of nearly 50% and the loss of a lot of people who did the on-call.

Sure you can see where this is heading! We have now been told we will be working 1 in 4 weeks on call 24/7. There was no discussion this was literally an email that was fired round to everyone telling us what weeks we'd be working. You can imagine how this has gone down and there has been push back but we're being told that since Brexit the rules have changed and basically the employer can do what they want. Now admittedly I have no idea what the rules were before let alone if they've changed but it seems a bit suspect to me.

We are being told that previously they couldn't implement 24/7 on-call due to a couple of EU rulings.

One being what defined working hours, which seemed to be if you're too restricted in what you can do with your own time it counts as work. To be clear what they are referring to on-call isn't being available for the odd emergency, they've sold a 24/7 service to customers where they are expecting the same response if they phone up at 2am Saturday morning as they would get at 10am on a Tuesday. This means you can in practice do nothing with your time as you have to be ready to take and action a call immediately. The employer is claiming your time is your own and you just need to make sure you have your laptop and phone with you but in reality that's not always practical so for me at least it will mean cancelling plans and sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring. You can't exactly fire up your laptop and start a remote support session halfway through your shopping trip to Tesco and we're expect to respond within minutes so you can't call someone back 30 minutes or an hour later.

The other is the issue of break time. We're being told that previously the EU required an 11 hour break between work days, with some exceptions for moving between shift patterns. So if they want you starting work at 9am you'd have to end being on-call at 10pm the previous day. Again they are saying this doesn't now apply as we're no longer in the EU.

I've worked on-call before but its never been an issue as its been for genuine 'the office is on fire' type emergencies, not things like the printer is out of paper at 3am. Does what they are requiring even count as on-call? Surely if you're selling a 24/7 service you have to set the company up to be staffed 24/7? Does any of this ring true? It seems more to me like something they've made up to achieve their own objectives, if you ask any questions they don't have the answers.

Don't want to be the troublemaker and we're already getting the 'you're lucky to have a job' line, equally don't want to be taken advantage of and have concerns about the mental health impact of what they are proposing.

The EU Working Time Directive was incorporated into UK law as the Working Time Regulations.
I'm not aware of the WTRs being rescinded

Serenity74

General_Grant said:

The EU Working Time Directive was incorporated into UK law as the Working Time Regulations.

I'm not aware of the WTRs being rescinded

My gut feeling when they were saying it was all changed is that something sounded off. Now to try and work out if what they're proposing stands up against the WTD.