Introduction

The issue of the calculation of working time continues to occupy the institutions of the European Union (EU), with recent attempts to revise parts of the ‘Working Time’ directive resulting in a failure to reach agreement between the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament.

One of the principal stumbling blocks appears to have been how to count on-call time, i.e. the time that an employee is at his/her place of work and therefore at his/her employer’s disposal but not actually working. A proposal to differentiate between ‘active’ on-call time and ‘inactive’ on-call time, with the former counting as working time and the latter not counting, was made by the European Commission but in April 2009 the Parliament rejected