Travel is work says top European court

If you’ve ever dreamed about a job that requires more business travel, perhaps it’s time to move to Europe. The European Union’s top court dropped a bombshell on employers throughout the continent this week, saying that employees who travel on the job can consider travel time as work, and therefore should be paid for it.

But before whipping out any duffel bags and putting your house on the market, take a look at the fine print. The court's decision doesn’t not mean that every single worker gets paid for the daily commute, only those who travel while on the job: plumbers, gas fitters, and sales reps — i.e those “without fixed or habitual place of work between their homes and the first and last customer of the day.”

The best example is in the company named in the lawsuit, Ireland-based Tyco. After the company closed its regional office in Spain in 2011, workers were forced to travel long distances (“sometimes more than 100 kilometres taking up to three hours to drive”) in the province they work and beyond. Until now, that time was not considered work, but rest, and Tyco only paid for the time it took to do the job on the site. With the ruling, the travel time must be factored into the work hours.

"The Court considers workers in such a situation to be carrying out their activity or duties over the whole duration of those journeys. The workers are at the employer’s disposal for the time of the Journeys” and “are therefore not able to use their time freely and pursue their own interests.”

Actually, that's not very different from current U.S. law, which considers some travel as “compensable work time,” but applies that “only if the travel is within the normal commuting area for the employer's business and the use of the vehicle is subject to an agreement between the employer and the employee.”

In other words, much like the E.U’s ruling, if an employee is required to travel after clocking in, he or she must be paid for the travel time. That's especially important for business travelers, who are entitled to payment for time spent in transit to a destination, but even these rules are not clear cut.

Nolo, “the largest network of high-quality legal websites,” points on in its analysis of the law that employers, for example, can deduct the time it takes to get to the airport. On overnight trips, only travel time occurring during regular hours must be compensated, so the red eye gets you nothing.

Whatever the case, business travelers in the United States and Europe might want to take a closer look at the law.