Travelling to work 'is work', European court rules | Hacker News Reader

Travelling to work 'is work', European court rules

bbc.com

232 pointswj136 comments

In the US, I worked for a consulting group in the bay area (Fremont). There was a big discussion about whether or not we were on the clock while driving to client sites, because some people wanted to live in Tracy and other people closer to the office, and the client sites were all over the place. So how to calculate this?

One way to do it was just to say you have to show up to the the Fremont office before going anywhere ('fixed office'), but this can be wasteful for everyone, since the client site can be in the opposite direction of the office. The final agreement was that the time it would have taken you to get to/from the office was your own time, and from then on you're on the clock and paid.

So if you live next to the office and get sent somewhere, your whole commute time to that place is paid. If you want to live in Tracy and drive an hour into work, that's ok, but your commute to the client site is only paid if it's longer than an hour or so. If you had to go to two client sites in a single day, the time between the client sites was always paid.

Nobody really had any idea if this was legal or not, but all of the consultants agreed it was very fair.

That sounds very reasonable. That leaves the power in the hands of the employee and makes it very simple for the employer.

My wife's current employer handles it this way. And it does seem like a fair compromise for cases of occasional semi-local travel (in her case, a remote office that's 50 miles from home and visited monthly, vs. her usual 12 mile commute).

Her previous employer didn't count any commuting to client sites as "on the clock". One of many reasons she left. Granted, this was a Beltway Bandit and all work was at client sites, but as contracts changed, her commute changed dramatically (not just within the city, but as much as 2 hours on the Interstate).

IIRC this is how the IRS recommends milage expenses are to be treated. The delta of your normal commute = work.

Sounds like the employees got screwed over. Why not just pay everyone for all the driving hours they did? Then if you happen to live next to the client you don't get paid for driving you didn't do, and you can get more actual work done too.

The article's headline is not in line with the ruling of course, but it's not even what most people in this thread are assuming. The ECJ's rulings are to be interpreted very narrowly. In this specific circumstance, the company closed an office after which people had longer commutes. So this ruling in no shape or form means that people who took a job with a certain commute now all of a sudden will be paid for that commute! It's only the people where, through the choice of the employer, the commute has become longer, who can use this as a precedent. Precedent case facts matter a lot!

Doesn't this apply to eg care workers who visit clients in the client's home where the care worker's employer doesn't have a central office?

The closing of the office is an unimportant detail of this particular case.

I haven't seen anything else that interprets this case as narrowly as you do.

From the linked article:

"The court ruling said: "The fact that the workers begin and finish the journeys at their homes stems directly from the decision of their employer to abolish the regional offices and not from the desire of the workers themselves."

So, the closure of the office seems to be highly relevant.

"The closing of the office is an unimportant detail of this particular case."

Says who? All precedent is to be interpreted narrowly in scope wrt to the facts, and that's not even taking into account that judge-made law as a concept is, in general, foreign to most EU jurisdictions (with the UK being the most notable exception). While there is not much dispute over the primacy of the ECJ over national law (although de jure this is not even a given!), there is no reason to assume that broad, general doctrines laid out by the ECJ all of a sudden constitute new law in the members of the Treaty (I mean, I'm not even talking about the ECJ-equivalent of a 'van Gend en Loos' ruling, I'm just talking about de factor interpretation by member state judiciaries and administrations).

Furthermore I'm a bit perplexed at how easily you seem to dismiss the closing of the office, which is absolutely material to this case. It's quite different when a unilateral decision of a party affects the counter party, or if both parties knew what they got into from the start! Also, or maybe 'especially', in employment cases. Please tell what you base your assertion on, because it's in direct contradiction with all literature and practice.

(and yes, I do have a law degree, although it's been a few years since I last studied any EU law, so I'm not claiming to be an expert here).

Where is your law degree from? The vast majority of EU coutries follow civil law (as opposed to common law) and courts are supposed to interpret law, not interpret precedents. Basically the only holdout to this is the UK, which leads to civil law sometimes being referred to as Continental law.

That being said, the closing of the office was definitely the important fact in this case, but this doesn't narrow the scope of the law. The law says that companies cannot require work weeks of more than 48 hours. Excluding commutes can lead to preposterous results, so there are a variety of circumstances where commute time must be considered as part of the work. This case just happened to be about one such set of circumstances. Where to draw the line is determined by the individual judges.

"The vast majority of EU coutries follow civil law (as opposed to common law) and courts are supposed to interpret law, not interpret precedents. Basically the only holdout to this is the UK, which leads to civil law sometimes being referred to as Continental law."

Right, which is what I said.

The situation is different because in this case the resulting (permanent) change in the employees' commute was something they couldn't have been aware of at the time they signed the employment contract.

For care workers working on site at clients the varying commute is a condition of their employment at the time they sign the contract. Unless the client's home is in an extremely remote area, there's nothing wrong with the varying commutes.

I believe you are right. I think the law doesn't regard all commutes, "fixed" workplaces are exempt:

A) You go to your workplace to arrive at 8 am, then you travel 150km away to a site. Your commute to the "base" is not included, however, your work time is until you arrive at the base and leave

B) Some employers would just tell you to be at the site at 8am - you'd have to leave 2 hours earlier and not be paid for it

In my understanding, the law regards B, making the employer pay you for your time (I KNOW, THE HORROR /s)

I think you are misunderstanding the ruling. And while the headline isn't 100% correct! it is more inline with what everyone is discussing than what you claim it is. At one time the employed commuted to a regional office. From there they would travel to the client site. Now the office is closed, the company no longer has an office in the area. Now the employees commute from their home to a client site. Some days it was longer than before, some days shorter. Before the closure, the company paid for commuting from the fixed office to the site. Now it doesn't. The court said it was wrong, and if you are expected to commute from your home to a non fixed point you deserve compensation. The fact that the office closed isn't really important. What is important is there is no fixed office that you commute to first. This is not the case that the new office is further than the old one.

> Time spent travelling to and from first and last appointments by workers without a fixed office should be regarded as working time, the European Court of Justice has ruled

Oh well.

Thankfully, because I wouldn't want to be discriminated against if I chose to live further away from work so I could afford a nicer, bigger place.

Fun fact: In Japan most companies will pay for your public transport ticket.

Never heard any suggestion of discrimination based on this though.

Although time cost > public transport cost.

Here in Brazil it's the same and I've heard plenty of stories of companies who wouldn't hire people if they cost more than X per day in transportation. Not for tech workers, but for unskilled jobs.

Same here in the Netherlands. For skilled labor it's generally a non-issue, for unskilled labor they'll often require you to live near or own a transport card already.

The incentive to discriminate would be pretty high if employers were forced to pay per hour of missed work. Man hours are more expensive than travel costs

I’ve only seen this for students of universities and all kinds of schools here in Europe.

Although school students only get a ticket for their way from school to home, and university students get a ticket that allows them to get anywhere in their region for free.

The same type of arrangement is also common in North America, though many students who live off-campus, or in suburbs resent having to subsidize the city dwellers (as the programs are usually mandatory).

Well, this is Europe – so, at least in Germany, 95% live off-campus, and many in suburbs. But due to being Europe, busses every 15min are usual even in the farthest suburbs.

I have been told I live too far way when applying for a job in Tokyo. I don't think that had anything to do with the cost of transportation (which would probably have been under $100 a month). I can think of plenty of other reasons. I can imagine assuming the long commute will affect job perf. I can imagine assuming someone with a long commute more likely to seek other employment. I can imagine someone with a long commute needing to leave the office earlier. I'm not saying those are true only guessing at reasons it came up.

On the opposite side I once hired someone in So Cal that had a long commute. Alhambra to Newport Beach. He lasted 2 weeks before he put in his notice because the commute was too long.

They absolutely do. And they always ask you where do you live when you are applying for a job.

Obviously, this is not the most important point to decide whether they hire you or not, but the price of the commuting fee can make them choose between two similar candidates. Specially for low paying jobs.

Fun fact: In Japan most companies will pay for your public transport ticket.

This is primarily a tax optimization, FWIW. If I pay you 10万 in cash, I owe the government ~１万 and you owe the government maybe 3万 or so (depends heavily on bracket). If I pay you 10万 for your train ticket, neither of use owes the government additional taxes.

Thus, if we come to the agreement that your labor is worth 35万 a month to the company, it is in our mutual interest to characterize that as 25万 of salary and 10万 of "reasonable travel expenses."

There exists a spectrum of how aggressive companies are on this one. Some play things very safe and use the actual cost of the shortest public transportation between your house and the office, going to elaborate lengths to calculate that. Some say "We assume, unless you tell us differently, that transportation costs you more than 10万 a month, and will accordingly compensate you for the first 10万 of it." (The reimbursement is only non-taxable up to １０万.)

(Edit to add: １万円 = 10k yen = ~ $100. Much like our Indian friends count things in lahks and crores, Japanese breaks numbers lower than a hundred million into a count of 10^4 rather than a count of 10^3.)

This is also why we get 600 RMB every month on a card in China for lunch. So Microsoft does offer free lunches to some employees, just not in the states.

The 万 is used in China as well, confusing as heck when talking about home prices.

Funny how using 円 for both Yen and Yuan carried over to the dollar-style currency symbol, ¥, which is also shared.

I rarely see the yen symbol used, I don't even know how to type it, instead we have 人民币, 块, 元。

Oh, I know it's not used in actual Chinese or Japanese text. It's more used in other languages in place of the hanzi/kanji.

Same for the Netherlands, a lot of employers reimburse the public transport subscription costs or pay an amount depending on km distance between work and home. That's wherever you live, even if you are more than an hour train ride away.

French companies are required to pay 50% of your monthly transport ticket (which you can then also use on week-ends and evenings, so it pays for a bit more than 50% of your commuting costs in the end).

What a bizarrely unfair tax. Why not just drop the cost of (public) transport 50% ?

(1) not all transport is public (2) you'd have to make up for income losses for public transport companies with increased taxes, but now instead of driving income for public transport companies through market demand you're creating subsidies, which creates an organisational culture that's not consumer-oriented but rather oriented towards the government that subsidises it.

Anyway there are pros and cons, these are just the cons. If you ask me public transport would be a big source of investments and a completely free service like say the justice system, public roads, parks etc. Moving about the city in the safest, most efficient, cheapest, cleanest and environmentally friendly manner that's mass transit (i.e. ignoring say bicycles) should be free if you ask me.

Why not socialise public transport and replace the fees with tax-based funding altogether?

Sorry, that's my inner socialist leaking.

How would you allocate the money between mass transit (RATP), long-range transit (SNCF), bike rentals (Vélib) and electric car rentals (Autolib) ? And this is for Paris alone.

For operating costs, usage seems the obvious way.

Now that smartphones are becoming ubiquitous, I suspect it could even be done statistically. Create a good transit app with embedded tracking. You'd know where people were trying to go to, how they ended up getting there, how long it took, etc.

Do that and you could eliminate all of the overhead of ticketing, charging, etc. It wouldn't be perfectly accurate, but it's not like the current system is either. [1]

[1] http://www.dw.com/en/jumping-the-barriers-on-the-paris-metro...

> Create a good transit app with embedded tracking

if this would have to be mandatory it wouldn't catch on with anyone remotely concerned about privacy.

A group which, on present evidence, is about 0.1% of the population, which would not be a big problem for the scheme. But there's no reason to make it mandatory in that the goal is to make transit free and allocate money statistically. No harm would be done by putting some obscure checkboxes deep in the settings.

Funny how the first idea in your head involves surveillance and the first idea in mine is socialising infrastructure (i.e. everybody pays).

You wouldn't happen to be American by any chance?

It makes sense though, in societies where you don't or can't live where you work. Why would you want to work for an employer when part of your money goes to getting to work? On the other side of the coin, if an employer can get good people from all around by just paying for the commute, that's only going to be good for them. Plus there's tax benefits; if you have 200 / month in travel expenses, either the boss pays it, or pays you an extra 400 (which comes down to 200 with imaginary taxes)

My GF had a job in the next city, thanks to roadworks and the like a 1.5 - 2 hour commute, unpaid; she worked 40 hours a week, plus 15-20 hours for commuting. IIRC a third of her crappy wage was spent on even getting to and from work, let alone the time. She's now self-employed in her own town, works 20ish hours a week, and makes about the same or a bit more.

Commuting is not something one does with pleasure, generally speaking.

There's something like that in most of europe and it's a tax thing, the company pays less taxes on that kind of comp rather than straight money. That's why in some countries almost every company will provide a company car: leasing cars and using that as comp' costs the company less than giving their employees the same comp' in straight cash.

The ruling only applies to workers who are being sent to appointments, rather than working from a fixed office. E.g. sales reps, care workers. From the article:

"Time spent travelling to and from first and last appointments by workers without a fixed office should be regarded as working time, the European Court of Justice has ruled."

This seems fair to me. I know people who are regularly leaving home at 5am to make their first appointment at 9am just so their employer can avoid paying them overtime.

At the cost of higher travel expenses to anywhere, though. I've been looking into the housing market lately; right now I live in a rental house close to a train station, my commute is about an hour. For the same price I can get a nice three bedroom house in a town somewhere, but it would be further away from anything - ergo, more travel expenses.

Its only for Blue collar hourly paid employees like Telecoms Engineers (Linemen).

M&P Salaried staff will be unaffected.

On the other hand, there are many minimum wage jobs, at least in the U.S., where living close to work is completely out of the question financially. So there's an implicit 2+ hour unpaid daily commute required to have that job.

I'm not sure how to give affluent people the freedom to exchange commute times for lifestyle choices without forcing the same lifestyle choices on the less privileged.

Pretty misleading headline.

It's written "traveling" to work, not "commuting" though.

A better title would have been travelling "for" work. A commute to an office is not "for" work. A commute to a patient's home is "for" work.

What do they mean by "without a fixed office" ?

I assume outside sales, plumbers, tow-truck drivers, or anything else where the work is done at customer premises, or at some random location away from the company headquarters.

This particular ruling was against a company that closed all their regional offices and forced people to work with customers on-site all the time.

Care workers who travel to people's homes.

It's a rule of headlines, similar to Betteridge's, but more specific: If a UK newspaper headline claims that the EU has done something crazy, reading the story will reveal that they haven't.

Decades of clickbait headlines may catch up on us soon as people get to vote on whether to leave the EU and they'll be basing their choice partly on headlines roughly of the form "EU rules say Queen to be replaced by an unelected German".

But the Queen is an unelected German.

Exactly :)

First time an employee goes to claim this, they will be allocated to a fixed office and required to attend there before heading out to appointments.

Which would be fine for the employee, since then he would spend like 30 minutes of his own time to come to the office, and then additional 2 hours of paid company time while traveling to the client. Before his regulations, the employee would need to spend 2 hours of his own time while going to the client without ever being reimbursed.

The best thing about being a consultant and running your own business is that every expense or spent time around work is considered WORK. As a basic employee in the US, you never get these sort of benefits and write-offs. When I hear people commuting 1 hour to work, that means they work 50 hours a week (assuming a 40 hours at the office). Their hourly rate is effectively much lower.

Not necessarily, salaried employees have other benefits that the self-employed simply do not have, such as health care, retirement plans, bonuses, guaranteed income, etc. Furthermore salaried employees do not have to pay self-employment taxes, gross receipts taxes, property taxes, business insurance and the whole bucket load of expenses that businesses need to pay which effectively lowers the hourly-rate of the self-employed.

This, for sure.

I have a 1 hour commute now. When I go looking for another job, the commute time will be factored into the salary number I'm willing to accept. Every 5 minutes I add to my commute on average constitutes 3.33 hours a month doing things I don't want to and wouldn't normally do (commuting). The way an employer gets me to do things I wouldn't normally be doing for them is to pay me more. It's simple.

I don't like to drive and hate sitting in traffic, so if I can't reasonably take public transportation, they have to pay me more to drive, too.

This has resulted in me flat out turning down interviews with companies I'd otherwise consider, and I'm ok with that.

I guess this should also apply to work trips then? I knew one guy who would only book a flight from 9am on Monday mornings, rather than being pressured into Sunday night or sillyAM Monday morning.

When I told other people who travel for work abot this the response was pretty much that he should be fired.

Sad, but this seems to be hardwired in to human nature. See also 6am-3pm, 10am-7pm, "four tens", telecommuting, unpaid leave to supplement vacation, and other things employees do to improve their own quality of life without harming anybody else.

There's a dominant personality type that, when it sees somebody getting something nice seeks to tear them back down. The concept of "what a great idea. I could do that too" never breaks into conscious thought. Only rage and the desire to bring the offender back to the status quo. Ideally with punishment.

-- Ideally with punishment

Yes, or shame. "It will look like you aren't a hard worker."

At my last job, travel time was added to my timesheet. A (rare!) transcontinental flight tended to give me an extra day off.

This was a public sector job in the UK.

Rightly so too. I always take time off to compensate for time spent travelling for work. I don't know why anyone would think this is unusual.

It's already the law in France (no business travel in weekends), exactly to protect workers against situations like that.

So for salaried roles you would not calculate your TOIL if you had to travel at weekends BTW the convention in the UK was working on Sunday = 2X plus a day.

My employers suggest that any business travel be done during normal office hours if possible. And I am inclined to agree with them.

Makes sense; nobody is going to tell you it's not your job to get somewhere you are being payed to be.

But...is it the employers issue if you choose to work 4 hours away from where you live? Are they allowed to not employ people based on where they live as it is going to impact their costs?

I like the idea, but i get the feeling the implementation will result in no major benefit for anyone.

Edit: I'm an idiot and i understand now :-)

This is only if there is no fixed office, if they had an office they this would not matter and would be the employees issue. Obviously the travel time from the office to the client is during work time.

What if you're a sales rep working out of your car (so no fixed office). Your region is London, but you live in (checks google maps...) Manchester. Your first sales appointment is always going to be 250km away. Should traveling that 250km count as work?

Yes, this is what this law case was about: Only the first and last appointment on a day.

The company can solve that by having a London office, and then your time to and from that London office isn't work, but between there and anywhere else is. I think the spirit is that the employee should know where they're supposed to be working from and be able to choose where to live based on that.

Your contract would define a usual place of work, but if that is London then the company would have to pay your time to come into the office in Manchester.

(I think. I'vec not had a job like this.)

If the company is insisting on sending a rep. from Manchester down to London then absolutely.

Sure, a rep whose normal region is Manchester should be able to claim an extra commute to London as time worked. I was thinking more that the rep was hired as a London rep, but chooses to live in Manchester. So the rep is abusing the rules to work fewer hours, and coding his startup/watching Netflix on the commute.

I think that problem would end up 'solving' itself when that sales rep ends up making 1-2 sales call in the time it takes colleagues to make 10-12 and the company firing him for gross inefficiency.

This isn't about this. This is about people where travel is some part of their job. If your employer says you have to be 20 miles north of town at 8 am and 30 miles south of town at another appointment starting at 2pm, they can't pretend that driving those 50 miles in between shouldn't be on the clock.

For ordinary folks who have a fixed workplace every day this ruling has zero impact.

Right! OK that makes a lot of sense. Thank you I don't know why I didn't get that right away.

"The ruling came about because of [...] a company which [...] installs security systems. The company shut its regional offices down in 2011, resulting in employees travelling varying distances before arriving at their first appointment."

(Using US examples in the following, because probably the majority of the readers understand it better than European cities, even though it does not apply to the US).

Say you are living in NYC where your company is based. Every day you get an email telling you where you have to install a new security system. One day it might be Brooklyn, one day it might be Washinton D.C, because everything is being managed from the central NYC office.

Why exactly should traveling to and between the appointment (say Newark in the morning, Bronx in the evening) not be considered work? The employee is not living 4 hours away from the first appointment because he wants to own a bigger house, but because his employer has told him to work there.

That example makes sense, but if you want to impose a rule you have to worry about the cases where it doesn't make sense. What about a plumbing business which dispatches jobs within a 5 mile radius. If the employee moves 2 hours away, suddenly the company has to pay 4 hours a day of commuting.

The net result of this could easily be workers being required to travel to and from a central location as a workaround, when they could have better outcomes travelling straight from home - hurting the people you are supposedly want to help.

> What about a plumbing business which dispatches jobs within a 5 mile radius. If the employee moves 2 hours away, suddenly the company has to pay 4 hours a day of commuting.

As you say, if the company has a fixed office at the centre of that radius, they can still tell the worker that their days begin when they arrive at the office, and then the 'worktime' begins once they get there, ready to travel out to the first customer. That's how many businesses operate anyway — and how the business at the centre of this case used to work. The case was brought once they closed that office down.

It's not exactly a 1:1 comparison.

A better example would be:

Say you live in the Bronx, and you sign on to a company that installs fire alarm systems that has branch offices in Manhattan and Newark. You report to the office in Manhattan daily before your first appointment and return there after your last appointment, performing installations and maintenance in Manhattan. The company decides that keeping the Manhattan office open isn't cost-effective, so they close that office and tell you to report to the Newark office instead.

Under this ruling, you aren't considered working only for the time it took to get to the now-closed Manhattan office; the extra commute time added directly due to the office closure is now considered "on the clock".

This will make the cost of running a business in a big city a little more worthwhile in the EU, and will somewhat depress the commercial real estate market.

I realize working in the tech industry we are not exposed to the real issues that resulted in this, but prior to my work in this field, I worked in the energy industry. We worked on the road travelling to different job sites. Our employer would put us up in a hotel and we would drive to the job site. Some big jobs had 'man camps' on site so you didn't have to worry about this, but often we would be an hour or more from the job site and commute everyday. We didn't get to decide where we lived. In one instance my hotel was in one country and my work site in another. We spent an hour just dealing with border control each way, every day.

Now I am US citizen so this doesn't help me any but this is a global job and the same circumstances exist in Europe as they do here for working field service jobs. I gave just one small example, but think about all the plumbers, HVAC, electricians, construction workers, highway crews, that all have to travel to the job site. Their employer bids on jobs that are often very far from their homes and the shop.

It really sucks having to bust ass for 12 hours a day and have an hour or more commute back home, or back to the shop everyday after work. It sucks even more that it's unpaid, but until now people just had to accept as being a norm.

I'm certain there will need to be adjustments in labor rate/job bids to accommodate this, but the hopeful in me is that it's worth it.

edit: sorry I saw your edit after I posted.

> Are they allowed to not employ people based on where they live as it is going to impact their costs?

Yup, I'd say so. It's up to an employer to decide whether someone's good enough to be worth paying their travel expenses. In my company's case, traveling expenses are about a quarter of people's wages (or maybe that's just me). Lease cars and such. We've had colleagues that had a two hour commute here, who stayed with the company not because they liked the commute, but because they liked the company and the company paid for their travel expenses. In higher-end IT, people are worth their weight in gold, and one has to do anything to get and keep them.

Tangential, but related to the headline:

In China, if an employee has an accident on the way to work, the employer is required to provide care and compensation (not liability compensation, just regular employee compensation) just as if the accident had happened in the workplace.

This ruling was made in 2013.

Same thing in Brazil.

I'm a bit confused how they claim this has no effect on UK minimum wage workers.

If that travel time counts towards my 48 hours max working hours why doesn't it also count as time I should be paid for?

In programming terms: namespacing.

You have a set of activities which people do. You have validations on those activities. To determine whether a working arrangement is legal, all validations must pass. The UK has one set of validations. The EU has another. Some of them check the same things.

Both the EU and UK validations make use of abstractions. One of these abstractions they reference is a particular symbol named 'work'. However, the symbol for 'work' is not defined in a common namespace or dictionary, but is instead private to each ruleset. Therefore if the EU court rules that 'work' must be defined a certain way for the purposes of EU regulations, it does not affect the UK regulations.

If you think that's at all confusing wait until you hear about the government of the city of London. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1ROpIKZe-c

that video kinda reminded me of the enclaves exclaves one.

BTW, The City even has its own police force afaik. It really is a strange place...

People can claim all they want, until a UK employee sues his employer in European courts and wins, and then they can't.

This affects any worker who does not work in a fixed place and is otherwise forced to attend appointments, regardless of pay grade.

Are you sure it applies to Salleried roles?

Do you mean "salaried" ? It applies to all employees (i.e. not contractors / self-employed) required to work without a fixed starting point.

It will be interesting to see how this ruling will affect people who have to irregularly shift across different workplaces. If I'm hired to work at McDonald's in Town A, but then one day I'm told to show up at the one in Town B just for the day, I should technically start my work day at McD-A first, then travel to McD-B during work hours. That is a real scenario for a lot of low-wage franchise operators.

Because the UK law is a different law from this European law, and uses its own definition of working.

Start the autonomous car, let it send a "punch the clock" event to work.

Status: 1) Remote 2) in office 3) working, in route?

Additionally, only accept meetings when status is 3).

I'm convinced way down the road (ahem...pun) that autonomous vehicles are going to become our work spaces. We already see it with some people getting work done on their company buses. But those are limited in terms of letting you work fully.

In our future, you'll have your own personal space on a self-driving car. Room for proper placement of your laptop + keyboard. Ability to loudly participate in conference calls. Dual screens.

And this opens up home ownership possibilities. Bay Area home prices are going through the roof. If companies want to hire people, they need to account for housing prices. Well, why not hire people who live 2 hours away? For example, the job may be in San Francisco (median home price $1.063 million), but the employee lives in Roseville (media home price $372,200).

The work day starts with the 8 am commute. Our employee lets the vehicle drive and starts working. Emails, documents, conference calls, etc. He then shows up in the office at 10 am. Gets that key face time and benefits from those serendipitous moments that only occur in person. Exits the office at 4:30 pm to return home, working on the commute. Has dinner with the kids and helps them with the homework.

One can see real possibilities for positive change once we have autonomous vehicles.

I've been thinking about this a lot.

I think that ultimately, a lot of offices are going to be replaced by virtual reality offices. This would cut our dependance on commuting.

This is for people without fixed offices eg travelling salespeople etc. This is not saying your daily commute is work. The title of this submission is very misleading

Does this apply to consultants going to a customer (where they may be for a longer period of time)?

I've been wondering that, since I'm in the same situation. But, in my personal situation, our contracts are generally for longer terms, so I guess it is a fixed office - and we have a fixed HQ too. Which we don't generally visit during our workdays though.

Even if it would apply to consultants though, I doubt anything would change. Right now there's already laws in place here (NL), or just a company agreement, about longer commutes, iirc any commute longer than an hour can be written down as working hours.

But, in my personal situation, our contracts are generally for longer terms, so I guess it is a fixed office - and we have a fixed HQ too.

The issue is that you have no control over the location of these changing "fixed" offices, so your employer is free to assign you to a customer halfway across the country. Sounds exactly like the kind of situation this ruling is supposed to protect against.

I suspect not as I woudl imagine that Managerial and Professional jobs are excluded

IANAL, but in the US, if you are a consultant going to a customer, whether or not that is billable is up to your contract. Either way, you definitely CAN claim travel expenses during that period for tax purposes.

It may well do.

HMRC has guidelines about how long you have to work at a customer site before it is considered to be a fixed site like this. They have to do this because it informs tax decisions about travel expense claims.

I think the guideline is that after two years, the site should then not be eligible for travel expenses. Nearby sites are also not eligible - where the definition of nearby relates to how similar are the journeys taken to reach each site. Whilst HMRC clearly aren't the branch of government that are involved in this ruling, this is a similar structure around which such an argument could be made.

I don't know the generics, but this applies to employees in Italy. That rules consultants out from the catch all national contracts unless especially agreed upon beforehand.

IAN(Y/A)L

My place of work is fixed, but it's not an office. So, does this apply to me? :)

No, travelling to a work today is just stupid, work from home!

How does that work for a plumber? You fix your own plumbing?

For a lot of people on Hacker News, traveling to work is stupid. Of course electricians and plumbers must go on-site, but let's consider the general audience here.

Clickbait title.

Would love to see this implemented in Bangalore! With the traffic jams, one could get paid for just leaving home to get to work

Haha yeah, then you would see how fast would corporations allow working remotely (if the nature of the work makes it possible).

So... for some people, the work day now starts as soon as they leave the house. Now those with a "fixed office" can feel they are being hard done by... I have a feeling we started sliding down a slippery slope here.

Your own life has not gotten worse just become someone else's life has become better.

There are other comments explaining why this is a needed law. I'll let you read them.

Hopefully this puts more interest among executives and managers towards distributed/remote teams.

Know how I know you didn't read the article?

I read some of the article. Did you know that? I guess you signaled that you did not know that with your contentless comment.

I wonder if Europeans see the vicious circle they are in.

Step 1: More job regulations.

Step 2: Employees cost more and are harder to get rid of; Businesses less inclined to hire.

Step 3: Jobs are hard to get, so employees ask for more security from the government.

Repeat.

Like Germany, unemployment rate 4.7% and strong job protections?

No, more like all the countries that aren't Germany.

Or do you think it's a breeze seeking a job in France (unemployment ~10%), Italy (unemployment ~13%), Spain (unemployment ~20%), Greece (unemployment ~25%)...

There's many others if you want to take a look. http://www.statista.com/statistics/268830/unemployment-rate-...

Unemployment rates in those countries has nothing to do with EU regulations, and a lot more to do with the local taxes and country's stability.

Of course; I was answering the user who made a snarky comment using a single handpicked data point.

I did not say it was caused by EU regulations, just that Europeans (which include local governments) are in a vicious circle.

You're implying they are in a vicious circle because of these regulations.

Please take a look at the following graph: https://sturdyblog.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/greece-workin...

All your listed countries have higher working hours than Germany. In fact, the working hours in Greece are 50% higher than in Germany.

Annual working hours are highly correlated with unemployment rate. Note I'm not saying that a causes b, but the correlation is obvious.

On the other hand, there is no empirical evidence of workers' rights protection causing unemployment. That narrative often gets repeated, but that doesn't make it true.

> Annual working hours are highly correlated with unemployment rate. Note I'm not saying that a causes b, but the correlation is obvious.

Interesting... but like you said, it's just a correlation. Could as much be that people are less likely to work many hours when there's full employment, or when a country is richer.

> On the other hand, there is no empirical evidence of workers' rights protection causing unemployment. That narrative often gets repeated, but that doesn't make it true.

As a business owner, every additional regulation regarding employees is increasing my cost. (And it doesn't matter if I would have agreed anyway with what the law says; I still have to waste time learning it, more paperwork, less flexibility.) So I know that the more regulation there is in this field, the less I'm inclined to hire. It's not a narrative, that's my reality.

> As a business owner, every additional regulation regarding employees is increasing my cost.

My point was that it doesn't matter if every other business in your industry bears the same burden, too. Your competitive position stays the same. No profit opportunities are lost.

This. There is an American mindset which needs to change. We have a lot of businesses complaining about regulations, yet other countries with more regulation seem to conduct business in a profitable manner. In fact, it could be argued that the businesses operating in a more regulated environment, are probably more robust than their American counterparts because the regulations add stability and reduced uncertainty.

A lot of American business owners complain that their business is "hanging on by a thread". This is because they are operating at the lowest energy state which provides little safety margin for failure. If there were stronger regulations in America, then fragile business models would not be able to attract investment.

So you basically agree that if different countries employ similar regulations and work protection laws and have different employment levels, the latter does not really depend on the former ?

Virtually all jobs affected by this ruling are in the local services and construction business. Think masons, plumbers, etc.

As a) these jobs are by definition locally bound and b) the ruling affects all employers in these industries equally, I have a hard time seeing how that should negatively affect the employment situation.

Edit: We had a similar event in Germany: About a year ago a minimum wage law has been introduced. The industries affected are largely the same. The fears were the same: Overregulation was expected to be a job killer. The empirical results: New regular jobs have been created in these industries.

The last thing we want is less regulation and employee protections.

Yup, right into step 3.

The high unemployment rates are mostly a direct result of the financial crash (ironically, itself caused by not enough regulation) and resulting austerity measures and cuts to services.

They have very little to do with worker protections. If they did it would have been like this for a long time before 2008. They weren't.

It's not a zero-sum game where the only way you keep unemployment low is by going full USA and stripping workers of any kind of protection at all.

The US doesn't have any protections at all? Like none?

I guess that would explain why I do software dev in a working salt mine.

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