If you employ or plan to employ workers in the European Union
who have no habitual or fixed place of work, you should be aware of
a recent ruling of the European Court of Justice ("ECJ").
The ECJ determined in September that "working time" for
such peripatetic workers includes travel time from home to the
first designated customer and back home from the last designated
customer.
The issue arose in the case of Federacion de Servicios Privados
del sindicato Comisiones Obreras (CC.OO) v. Tyco Integrated
Security SL, Tyco Integrated Fire & Security Corporation
Servicios SA. In that case, the largest Spanish trade union brought
suit against Tyco, a security systems company, challenging
Tyco's interpretation of travel time. Tyco had asserted the
position that a worker's time from his home to his first
employer-designated customer and back home from the last
employer-designated customer was "rest time". The workers
in this case were technicians who installed and
