It is about the general question of how to evaluate the following readiness situation:
My colleagues and I regularly work in the IT of a medium-sized company 40 hours a week.
About every 4 weeks, one of us has additional on-call service. This means the following:
1) Outside office hours (8-17, Mon-Fri), the standby owner must be reachable at any time via a mobile phone provided (weekend included), if a customer reports for an (alleged) emergency - and of course edit it. For this he must of course have laptop and internet ad hoc ready - recreational activities and residence are therefore of course limited.
2) Even without a call, the stand-by owner must always check e-mails, ticket system and monitoring and, in case of doubt, be active if the situation requires it. For this there's no special notification or "work request" as for example 1) by a call.
3) This week will be compensated readiness with a single balancing day (= 1 day a 8h) and nothing beyond.
I would now be interested in the following aspects:
1) Is that legally legitimate? Which regulations apply here? (eg working time law?)
2) How is this stand-by service to be considered in terms of working time?
3) Which (alternative) manipulations do you know?
Sounds like a rule to pay for the on-call service for "good will", say as cheap as possible for the entrepreneur.
On-call service is a serious curtailment of personal leisure time and must be appropriately remunerated. 1 day off for a whole week sounds kind of puny.
and where that is unanimously accepted there's no attempt to change that.
can you help a lawyer for employment law. Although there are no detailed legal requirements for on-call duty, there are hundreds of court judgments that serve as "precedents".
If the AG has promised its customers a reaction time, this judgment may be interesting
https://www.haufe.de/personal/arbeitsrecht/eugh-urteil-bereitschaftsdienst-gilt-als-arbeitszeit_76_444062.html
to 2. Would I let the boss make exact specifications: eg. Every 3h or 2x a day.
A free day seems a bit poor for me.
Working time law may become interesting when the willingness to work, how to deal with the rest period.
Regrettably, our Girlfriend is a bit narrow-minded about specific statements (how often to check, for example). "You will probably be able to regulate this on your own responsibility, there's no kindergarten here."
I would actually per se actually look at the review as similar to "working hours".
In addition, of course, there's the danger that one sometimes notices a critical case at a very late stage - which of course, in turn, is regarded as a kind of "breach of duty".
This verdict is interesting - I had already read. The point is that even here with us there's no fixed reaction time (a few customers excepted) - but it is expected that just in case of doubt appropriate (also not defined) is reacted.
Do not suppose a works council does not exist either.
Does your employment contract already describe weekend work and participation in call readiness? Then I would actually have the topic with the employment contract sometimes checked by a lawyer. In the IT area, the work done outside normal working hours should then be logged relatively well.
Even if Internet at home is now taken for granted, you do not have to provide your private institution to the AG free of charge.
