The European Court of Justice has strengthened the rights of temporary workers when calculating surcharges for overtime.
Regulations in collective agreements, according to which paid annual leave taken is not taken into account when calculating overtime supplements, violate EU law, as emerged from a judgment of the highest EU court in Luxembourg on Thursday (case C-514/20).
The background to this is a dispute over the collective wage agreement for temporary work in Germany, which went from the Hamm Regional Labor Court to the Federal Labor Court.
The collective agreement stipulates that in months with 23 working days and more than 184 hours of work, a surcharge of 25 percent is paid.
The hours worked only include hours actually worked, but not vacation time.
A contract worker complained against it.
He had worked 13 days in August 2017 and took paid vacation for the remaining 10 working days.
The ECJ now stood behind the employee - even if the Federal Labor Court still has to decide in a specific case.
The judges in Luxembourg stressed that the regulation in question could prevent the worker from taking paid vacation in the month in which he worked overtime.
However, the aim of the right to annual paid leave is to give workers time to rest in order to protect their safety and health.
Any practice or omission by an employer that might discourage employees from increasing annual paid leave is contrary to that objective.