Comment by thesimon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thesimon | Hacker News Reader

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"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.

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.

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.

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