Potential implications of the Matzak judgment (quality of rest time, right to disconnect)

Abstract

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.